


All the Candles in the World

by FadesInTheSun



Category: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Averted Doom, Background Relationships, Body Horror, Minor Character Death, Multi, Polyamory, Silver Millennium Era, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-03
Updated: 2019-03-28
Packaged: 2019-08-09 18:36:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 41,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16455200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FadesInTheSun/pseuds/FadesInTheSun
Summary: The Senshi's job description is "risk your lives for Serenity." Not the Shitennou's. But when Kunzite, the most outspoken against the Moon, nearly dies in Serenity's defense, the Senshi find his behavior's the smallest mystery they need to unriddle. Because Mars foresees that as Earth's winter approaches, all the worlds' fires die.





	1. Cover

**Author's Note:**

> All art is by [smokingbomber](smokingbomber.tumblr.com), who also did beta duties.
> 
> Which makes sense, because this fic was born when I was talking about the idea for "Silver Apples of the Moon," and SB said wistfully something like: "Nobody ever writes for my OTP. And even if they do, it's Silver Millennium, and you know no matter what it's going to end badly."
> 
> So: have a Kunzite/Endymion (among others) fic, with a happy ending, and with Jupiter being randomly irritated at poultry. I promise there will be a happy ending. Eventually. When we get there.


	2. "I'll stay."

The Princess of Jupiter believed, very firmly, that there were things to be said for Earth. She did not, however, generally believe that they were to be found in Earth’s towns and cities. Soot-stained, stinking, torch- and candle-lit firetraps with the most exceedingly dubious sanitation she’d never wanted to imagine, and with little armful-sized monsters running about the streets, pecking at food scraps with beaks that their owners rarely seemed to recognize as the weapons they were. People complained about the other creatures, but dogs were at least mammals and often terribly cute; you could talk with a dog. It’d even like the idea. Cats … Earth cats made Jupiter very sad, but once she’d worked out that they didn’t know what they were missing, well. They liked company, too. Horses were all very well if people cleaned up after them. Mice and rats and crawling things at least weren’t supposed to be there. But chickens? Chickens were awful. And people kept them on purpose. Sometimes, Jupiter suspected that Earth cities just might be unforgivable.

So of course Princess Serenity wanted to see one.

Serenity was, of course, not permitted. Serenity was, of course, told sternly by both her mother and by the Princess of Venus that it was not only forbidden but far too dangerous. Serenity had, of course, had it drilled into her head that a single glimpse of her luminescent silver hair or too close an inspection of her too-fine-for-Earth hands might start a riot full of dozens or hundreds of people bent on stoning her to death or tearing her apart with their table knives or bare hands. Serenity knew, of course, that even if she kept her telltale looks secret, an innocent slip of a word or a suspicious failure to catch some local idiom or bit of slang might do the same thing.

And Serenity was, _absolutely of course_ , standing perhaps four feet away from Jupiter on this side and from the slight little Princess of Mercury on the other. Staring wide-eyed and avid through the (expensive, here) wide glass pane that made up a window of temptation into some merchant’s shop. On a soot-stained, stinking street where autumn’s early evening meant that shortly people would be hiring boys a fraction of Serenity’s age to bear torches or lanterns for them, in order to see which kind of unspeakable refuse they were stepping in. In, yes, a _city on Earth_.

Jupiter sighed. At least she didn’t need to hide under a heavy hooded cloak, like Serenity, or a lace-trimmed close-fitting bonnet, like Mercury. Her hair didn’t glow, and she wore it long enough to be acceptable under local prejudices. Out of the three of them, she was the only one still with the luxury of peripheral vision.

Which was why, when Serenity somehow caught a breath of something that actually smelled good to her and started purposefully down the street with Mercury hastily playing escort, Jupiter lingered for a moment. It was worth it for its own sake, anyhow. The merchant’s glasswork really was lovely. Not as delicate as the coolly elegant geometric designs she’d seen on the Moon, or the richer work of her own people on Io, but clear and bright all the same. The stem of one goblet in particular bore decorations almost organic in their curve, an unexpected rose suggesting a determined, triumphant struggle for light and air and independence, and she found herself almost wishing that she could take it home with her. Or a set. A set would do. Perhaps with a couple of matching decanters.

The thing she’d seen in her peripheral vision came closer. It was not a chicken. She did not find that an improvement.

It stopped just outside the range at which her hackles would’ve raised even more. Its voice was quiet, unremarkably so, but designed not to carry. “You don’t want that one.”

Jupiter drew a long, quiet breath between her teeth, filling her lungs exquisitely slowly while she worked through the reminders she needed. Prince Endymion’s most trusted men were all the same kind of being. Nephrite was, for all his being Earthborn and therefore sadly backward and tragically doomed, very definitely a human, with human hopes, human dreams, human sorrows and human determination to overcome them. Therefore all the rest of them were also humans. Therefore the one that had, somehow, become aware of their presence, found them, approached, and opened conversation with her must, also, be a human.

The fact that he was a two-faced, untrustworthy human, quick enough that he could sometimes bind Venus up in her own conversational loops, clever enough to be a potential threat, and confident enough that he’d argue against Endymion having any dealings with the Silver Millennium while there were Senshi and sometimes Serenity _in the same room with them_ , so that his suggestions for permanent expulsion of all non-Earthborn from the planet were _just a tiny bit personal_ , did not actually make him not a human. No matter how much wishful thinking she might indulge in. No matter the wistful hope that she might one day be able to electrocute him into smoking ash. Not that his prejudice against them was enough to justify that, really; that only warranted daydreams of a really good punch. No. No, that wasn’t what really got to Jupiter. What got to Jupiter was that he could argue like that with Venus in the room, and an hour and a half later she’d be looking for her commander and find that Venus had snuck off to _dance with him in the garden_.

She hoped that was a long-term ploy on Venus’s part, to change his mind or at least to get secrets out of him. She hoped it wasn’t just because he was _pretty_.

She let that breath out at last, in an irritated little huff, and didn’t try to keep the challenge out of her voice. “What one don’t I want, exactly?”

Kunzite took a half-step closer and pointed out the goblet she’d been looking at, then turned his hand at the wrist, making a little circling gesture to take in the array of similarly striking glass. “Those,” he said. “They’re pretty, but Endymion says that he’s seeing problems in people who drink from them too often. Nothing overt, nothing fast; it takes a long time. But their memory suffers. Their ability to concentrate. Sometimes their ability to sleep. You don’t need that.”

Jupiter folded her arms, eyeing Kunzite sidelong and skeptically. “You’re joking. If it made people sick, nobody would sell it. Or even if they were still allowed to sell it, nobody would _buy_ it.”

“‘Endymion says he’s seeing’ isn’t exactly ironclad proof to be enshrined in the law code,” Kunzite replied. “Someday he’ll be able to do something about it. Pass it off as a sumptuary law, maybe. But for now—” He shrugged. “Besides. It’s stronger than the older kinds of crystal glass. It doesn’t rot. So people want it.”

“Glass doesn’t _rot_ ,” Jupiter objected, appalled. “It was never alive in the first place. It’s like rock, it just … sits there. Until someone breaks it, anyway.”

“Perhaps on Jupiter, or on the Moon, glass is kind enough to always sit there and stay the same. Certainly colored glass usually does. But clear glass, the older kinds of crystal? Those often grow sick and rot, sometimes in as little as five or ten years. The new kind doesn’t. So it’s much desired for its enduring loveliness, without consideration for the cost that loveliness may incur.” Kunzite turned his head, glancing past the undisguised fall of his own white hair, and regarded Jupiter directly. “Where is your princess, I wonder? She seems to have made another of her escapes.”

Just one really good punch, Jupiter argued with herself. Just _one_. She kept her voice at least mostly civil, though. “She’s gone ahead a little. Mercury’s with her; she won’t get into trouble.”

Kunzite’s mouth curled at the corner into that annoying little smirk. “Your princess is capable of getting into trouble in a linen closet, Jupiter. Where the most threatening item at hand is a quilt.”

“That was _once!_ ” Maybe two really good punches. Maybe just a _little_ lightning. Jupiter tried to draw another calming breath, but her hands curled into fists at her sides, and she blew the air out again sharply and turned away to stalk down the street after the rest of her little group.

Three golden-brown-and-black chickens scrambled down the narrow street toward her, in a bizarre flapping gait that lifted them off the ground only shallowly and briefly: half-flight for a few feet at a time. For an instant, Jupiter almost took their advance as a personal affront, evidence that the planet really did hate her personally. Then she gritted her teeth, pulled up her skirts, and broke into a run, dodging between the birds. Maybe she’d upset them enough they’d peck Kunzite to death.

Serenity was running too, Jupiter saw in an instant as she gained the little square at the street’s end. Her lightweight shoes couldn’t be doing her feet any favors on the irregular cobblestones. The princess fetched up against a building’s wall with a little shriek, rebounding off of it and turning to try to spot her exit. The turn was a mistake. She had a hand up to hold her hood in place, but her cloak flared when she pivoted, giving a glimpse of her hair’s telltale glimmer in the oncoming dusk. Mercury was backing up with arms spread, making herself a barrier between Serenity and—

And the beginnings of a mob.

Jupiter didn’t try to count the Earthers chasing them; there were more than five or six, that was all she could take in at a glance. They didn’t all look too steady, and some of them were waving mugs in the air as improvised weapons. But there was more than one knife glittering, and one sword, she could see axes. And they were moving fast enough to intercept Serenity if she fled for one of the side streets.

Mercury drew a deep breath and pulled her hands in, crossing her arms defensively, then flinging them back out again with ice-blue light glimmering like flames at her fingertips. And the words she called told Jupiter far too much about how bad the situation already was. “Mercury Aqua Mist!”

The light spiralled out into fog, filling the square, blurring the sight of everything Earthborn there, human or not. Jupiter could still spot Mercury and Serenity easily, outlined by the cool blue of Mercury’s magic and the silver-white of the Moon’s; the Earthborn were less precise shapes, but still unmistakable. The closest few to her were all holding tableware, none of it sharp unless the one with the glass goblet broke it; one in the back had an axe that might serve as an actual weapon, but there were several of his friends in his way, and frankly he was more of a danger to them than to Jupiter right now. She kept running—tucking up her layered skirts with a desperate shove into their own waistbands—covering distance, calling the lightning as she did. Her skid to a halt half in front of Mercury left her in perfect position, shaping her magic to where she could fling it with her last step. “Sparkling Wide Pressure!”

She aimed for the Earther closest to Mercury, the sword-wielder; the lightning sparked brilliantly along the blade’s length. He screamed and dropped. The man behind him wasn’t touched; but he yelled in surprise, too, losing his balance, and fell directly into the path of a third. _That_  one couldn’t see more than a flare of light in Mercury’s fog. Certainly not the obstacle. He went sprawling.

Behind _them_  was another one with an axe. He started flailing with it at the air—

But Jupiter didn’t have time to watch, because there were steps behind and beside her, both charging blindly.

The closest one behind her had tableware, she remembered. Had _platters_  he was waving, as if they’d be useful shields. Mercury could get him. Or if not, well. Serenity could take a platter away from him and hit him over the head with it. She turned to deal with the one beside her.

He swung a frying pan at her.

Earth definitely hated her personally, she decided as she ducked. Or at least this city did. The fog did not; it covered her for the moment it took her to get her hands on the Earther, to pick him up bodily and fling him at the first of the two axemen. More bodies hit the square’s excuse for paving. She didn’t pause to see if they were bleeding.

Someone’s scream cut over the shouting, but it came from where the second axeman had been flailing blindly at the fog. Not from where Serenity was. That was all that was important.

The next one close to her, the one with the goblet, heard the screaming too. Mercury’s spell kept him from seeing much, but Jupiter was still nearly where she’d called the lightning from; he oriented on her, threw the piece of glass … and as she was flinging up her arm reflexively to ward it off from any chance of hitting her face, he turned and ran.

Something clattered off to her right. That wasn’t where Serenity was, either, she could half-hear the princess’s muffled yelp as Mercury maneuvered her into the slightly-safer space Jupiter was creating. A glance toward the clatter told her that a piece of the not-terribly-protective dishware had gotten dropped, and also incidentally that another of the fewer and fewer remaining attackers was still trying to charge blindly through the fog. Mercury already had the princess and the dishware-bearer to deal with. Jupiter took the time to aim a punch.

Her target hit the wall of the building next to her and sagged down it. She doubted he’d be getting back up.

Some of the others she wasn’t so sure about. The two men with axes were still concerns; she could hear the second one calling names, questioning. And there was a good deal of squawking where the first one had fallen.

A glance told her that that had become another confluence of still-moving Earthers, colliding with each other and trying to scramble to their feet. There was blood on the stones, and one of them was making more incoherent noises than the others, but none of them had stopped—

A ringing _clack_ of metal against something hard came from a few feet behind her, and near simultaneous with it, a quiet grunt. Then still less pleasant sounds.

Jupiter’s blood ran for an instant with something like Mercury’s ice. She crossed her arms, and prayed for lightning; she flung them out, and prayed that it was, somehow, not either of the Princesses that had made those sounds. “Supreme Thunder!” Electricity flared in the fog, and like the first one had, that group of Earthers fell still.

Princess Serenity’s scream was louder than any of the others had been.

Only one of the Earthers was still on his feet that she could see, that second axeman. He’d stopped calling names in favor of trying to flee; but the instant he cleared the fog, something small and whirling flew through the air and caught him, and he fell, too.

Jupiter took a breath and started to turn to where Serenity’s wails marked her as being, to where Mercury should be.

Zoisite met her eyes instead. In full uniform. Knives like the one that had taken that last of the attackers in both his hands, ready to throw.

Jupiter started, took a step back, and nearly fell herself as she tangled her feet in her own dropped shawl. With a surly glare, she spread her own hands out to the sides to show Zoisite she wasn’t about to engage him.

She yanked a foot free of the fabric. Another half-step forward steadied her again, and she finished taking in the disaster behind her. Serenity, there, whimpering now, a hand clasped over her mouth and blue eyes wide and staring down. Mercury at her feet, but kneeling, not collapsed. Somehow her bonnet was still in perfect place, not a strand of the lace askew.

Under Mercury’s hands lay Kunzite, his skin nearly as white as his hair. His uniform was not white, any longer. Soaked enough to glisten. Too dark for the blood not to be his.

The blood on his sword was not his. The man Jupiter had left for Mercury to deal with, the ridiculous one waving dishware, had dropped one of his platters to draw a knife. In the fog—

Kunzite wouldn’t have been able to see in the fog, either. Wouldn’t have been able to see him coming.

Must have killed him, keeping him away from Mercury and Serenity and Jupiter’s own back, the moment that he knew the man was there. But too late.

Jupiter’s own stomach knotted, and she made a small sound that echoed Serenity’s. At least Mars had used her power to pull him into the cold, to keep him from bleeding to death on the spot. At least that had left him unconscious, unable to feel the pain. At least there was that.

“Get away from him,” Zoisite said, and his voice was soft, was gentle, was a thing that like Serenity should have nothing to do with this moment at all.

Mercury didn’t look up. “Can you keep the blood flow stopped?” she asked. “Can you deal with the effects of the blood loss, or with the fevers that will follow?”

“Endymion can.” Zoisite glanced sidelong at Serenity, then moved to Mercury’s other side, coming around Kunzite’s body to kneel beside him.

“When the rot sets in?” Mercury asked. “It will. Soon.”

Jupiter flinched, then crossed to take Serenity’s arm and try to draw her away. But her delicate and sheltered princess refused to move: tugging back, pulling on Jupiter’s arm to try to draw her closer so she could turn her head and hide her face against Jupiter’s shoulder, but not shifting so much as a toe.

Jupiter closed her eyes, and reached to pull Serenity’s hood over her gently glowing hair again. At least whoever came by now wouldn’t see it. Except for however many people were peeking through windows, or cracks in shutters, or whatever. Let them gawk at the Shitennou instead.

Shame followed the thought fast and hard.

Zoisite stared at Mercury. For once, he wasn’t smiling. There was something tight and pinched about his mouth. Something he visibly hated about finally making his admission. “You can do something about that?”

Jupiter drew a shallow breath, thick with the blood-smell mingling with the general sewer-stink of the city. She finally caught up with the words Mercury wasn’t using, the concepts she was avoiding. Things like “transfusion,” yes, but also “infection,” or “bacteria,” or “sepsis.”

No wonder Earth cities were the awful places they were. If they really had no idea what they were doing to themselves …

“We can,” Mercury said. “But I need to get him to my lab. I need to do it now. You can take your chances on whatever your prince can do, or,” and her voice was very gentle, too, “you can get out of our way.”

“I won’t let you take him to the Moon without someone to be sure what you’re doing to him.” Zoisite straightened, though, shifting just a little bit away. One of the knives finally vanished. “Even if your intentions are completely innocent, you’d need someone to be able to vouch for what happened.”

“Fine,” Jupiter snapped. “You can both come visit. You can have a little tea party in the corner, and write down all your notes, and spend the next ten years trying to figure out what Mercury was doing—it won’t help, you know. But you can. As long as you can keep quiet so you don’t get caught.”

Princess Serenity moved a little against Jupiter’s shoulder, and brought a hand up to point. Without looking. It took Jupiter a moment to realize she was trying to indicate one of the Earthborn attackers. Serenity’s voice stayed muffled. “He’s not the only one hurt. Can we take them all?”

Jupiter envisioned the strain it was already going to be to haul two of the Shitennou with them, with just her and Mercury to channel the teleport. She opened her mouth—

—And was beaten to it. “No,” said Zoisite flatly. He came up to his feet in one quick motion. “No. They’re going into custody. You are not taking them to the Moon.”

Jupiter glanced over her shoulder, quick, but no-one had yet gathered up the courage to come close enough to hear the conversation clearly. She gave Zoisite another irritated stare. “How are you going to take them into custody here, and come with us there, at the same time?”

“The constables—” Zoisite started to say, and then stopped. Silent for a moment.

Even Jupiter could catch the general direction of his thoughts. Wait for the officials to arrive? Would Kunzite live that long? Go and find them—and leave the Silver Millennium visitors unwatched, where they could just abscond with everyone else involved? Leave for the Moon now, abandoning the fallen on the street, with no telling what would happen before someone official found them? Or even when someone did; with this many people attacking at once, knowing where to find their target … who else was involved to begin with?

Zoisite stood silent for the space of two breaths. Then the other knife flickered and vanished. “Take him.” There was nothing about his voice that wasn’t bitter. “I’ll stay.”


	3. "... all the worlds' fires die."

“You did what.”

Sometimes, when the Princess of Mars said things in that particular tone, they were questions. Jupiter was fairly sure that this was not one of those times. Since ‘if you tell me you were joking, I will only set your hair on fire; if you tell me you were serious, we’ll start with the flaying alive and end with dangling your blackened corpse off the bridge as a warning to any other fools who might strive to equal you’ wasn’t a question.

She really wished Serenity hadn’t stayed behind to fuss in the name of helping. Having someone on hand right now who was better than she was at defusing Mars would be the next thing to priceless.

“Mercury and the princess,” Jupiter sighed, “snuck Kunzite up from Earth and into Mercury’s lab so she could patch his gut back together and clean out the nasty bits. If she could only do that to his head as well as his stomach, it might even be worthwhile.”

Mars narrowed eyes the color of her planet’s twilight, and fixed Jupiter with a glare that promised mayhem. Mayhem was, at least, a notch down in her irritation rather than up. “You brought Kunzite here. By himself. For an extended stay. Where he can look for an opportunity to get up and look around Mercury’s lab by himself, and steal who knows what technology. Or use whatever secret Earth magic he has to commit any kind of sabotage he can imagine.”

“Oh, come on!” Jupiter lifted both hands, less in surrender than in self-defense. “Earthers don’t really have magic. You know that. Well, the prince does, sort of. And a couple of his men have a little. But most of them have to channel it through those enormous elaborate rituals, and need all kinds of things for it. Giant crystals and cauldrons and tree branches taller than they are. Skulls. Things like that. They don’t have much to start with, and they don’t really know what they’re doing with what they do have.”

A sharp exhale and a roll of her eyes expressed Mars’ opinion faster than her words did. “I’ve caught Zoisite spying on us invisibly. Twice. Jadeite’s an alchemist. And you’ve told me yourself Nephrite does divinations.”

“That’s not fair! He talks to the stars. It’s no different from your getting visions from the fire, except that it takes him all night and a roomful of equipment to do what you can do by sitting down and staring for ten minutes. Like I said, they’ve got a little, they’re just no good with it.”

“What he can do isn’t my point,” Mars retorted. “My point is, Endymion can do magic. Three of his four pets can do magic. But Kunzite? We’ve never seen him do anything like that. And all three of the others look up to him anyway. Do you really think he’s keeping nothing up his sleeves?”

Jupiter muttered something under her breath.

“I couldn’t hear you telling me I was right.”

Looking away from Mars didn’t make Jupiter any less uncomfortable. “Knives,” she said. “Like the ones Mercury says Zoisite carries. I was the one who took his jacket off.”

“That,” Mars said, through her teeth from the sound of it, “was not what I meant. Unless they were magic knives. Or unless you slit his throat with one of them.”

“No, I just meant … he …” Jupiter gave up, and put her hands a little higher in the air before letting them finally drop back down. “I meant you’re right. We think about Zoisite and Jadeite when we think about which of them are the sneaky ones. But Kunzite’s sneaky, too.”

“So’s Nephrite,” said Mars. “He only stops when you’re around because he’s too distracted by trying not to say something stupid. So. They’re all sneaky. And now we’re stuck with one of them in Mercury’s lab. The important question is, how do we keep him from trying to kill us all while he’s up here? As far as I’m concerned, slitting his throat is still on the table.”

“Except Serenity would cry,” Jupiter sighed.

Mars matched her. “You’re right. She would.”

Her tone did not quite say outright that it might be worth it.

The door shimmered blue in its depths, a silent warning of what might happen to anyone who tried to open it the wrong way without the proper clearances. The figure skulking outside, listening to the faint echoes of conversation from within, was undeterred. Only waiting for the proper moment. The very best moment. The moment when the voices in the room fell silent.

The moment that did not happen till after (the figure had counted) seven separate rounds of squeaking, sobbing, and/or agitated wailing. She was tempted to go in anyway at that last one, but cuddling the future Queen of the Silver Millennium to reassure her always seemed to somehow just make it impossible to yell at her afterward. Even when she really, really deserved it.

Finally, the talking went quiet. Finally, it stayed that way for more than five seconds without being interrupted by some kind of dismay. Finally, the skulking figure reached a gloved hand for the ominous door with the glacial heart.

It opened before her fingertips could touch it, which gave her just enough warning to brace.

The Princess of the Moon slammed into her foremost guardian’s chest with a startled yelp, a quick breath, and then a face buried in the Princess of Venus’s shoulder and the beginning of round number eight of sobbing. (Venus couldn’t help but mentally shake a fist at the universe around her. She’d waited so long just to avoid this moment happening, and it dropped it on her anyhow!)

“Vee,” Serenity gasped. “You came! You knew! How did you know? It’s awful! Mercury says it’s okay, everything will be fine, he’ll be all right, but it’s awful right now, you shouldn’t go in, no wait you should sit with him, no wait you should—” She ran out of air rather than running out of words, and trying to get a breath back while also tearing up and sniffling wound up with her producing an amazingly unprincesslike sound. Seven point eight out of ten, Venus decided.

She reached up and ran both hand through Serenity’s tails of hair, pushing them firmly back behind her shoulders and out of the danger zone. Whatever this was was enough of a mess without adding a literal one to it. “Breathe, Princess,” she said, in her firmest and most comforting voice.

Serenity did what she always did when faced with that firmest and most comforting voice: she giggled. Under the circumstances, there were hiccups involved. Venus judged this appropriate punishment for not taking her efforts at reassurance seriously.

She let her hands drop to Serenity’s shoulders. “We’re not going in right now,” she said firmly. “Because we’re going to do something a lot more important.”

“And because Mercury said we should wait,” Serenity added, still woeful, but more faintly so. “Well. I mean. She said if I couldn’t keep quiet, I should go and come back later. But that means we should wait.” The princess above all princesses paused, then blinked her enormous eyes at Venus. “What’s more important? What are we going to do?”

“We,” Venus told her, “are going to get you a shower. And then also a bath. You smell awful.”

Enormous and tragic eyes, Venus amended internally a moment later. And hastily tried to amend her words out loud before Serenity could start crying again. “I mean, it’s not your fault that you smell awful! You just smell like, well. Like you’ve been in the middle of a really nasty surgery, and we need to get that out before it sticks to your hair forever!”

This was not, evidently, the correct tack to take to keep tears away.

Well. That was all right. Venus could always yell at her later.

Nephrite towered over Zoisite. Not that this was new, but Zoisite really preferred it when the towering was being done in Nephrite’s “lazy confidence” mode, or even his “haughty arrogance” one, and not in “flare of white-hot temper.” One of these days he was going to have to find Nephrite’s emotional interior decorator and fire him. Or drop him into a lake. Maybe both.

“Yes.” Zoisite stayed in his seat, eyes half-lidded, one leg hooked casually over the other. The light of the oil lamps caught his hair and shadowed his face just so, the better to convey how little Nephrite’s anger was about to sway him. “Kunzite’s on the Moon. He’s alone. He’s probably at least half dead. The Senshi didn’t even get scratched. I understand that at least one of the men responsible is alive, awake, and in possession of an unshattered jaw. I could have gone to have a chat with him, but …”

Jadeite found a smile somewhere and tried it on. It didn’t fit him well, which oddly charmed Zoisite more than if the act had been wholly in place. “But there are things they wouldn’t believe from you, right now,” he said. “And I can make them believe it from me.”

“And if they are who you think?” Nephrite demanded. “What do we do then? We can’t just let them go—and we damned well can’t let them go to trial. And all the heavens help us if Endymion finds out fast enough to get his hands on them!”

Zoisite waved a hand, a little flit upward and out of fingers. “If we can keep Endymion focused on getting in touch with the Senshi, we can buy some time. On both fronts. If the Senshi are dealing with diplomacy, they won’t be as free to try digging their magic into Kunzite.”

“That’s a lot of if, right there,” Jadeite said.

“It’s the best I’ve got. After all. If we murder them out of hand, they’ll be martyrs. Valiant defenders of the Earth against the Lunar incursion, slaughtered like sheep by the corrupt and compromised officials betraying the Kingdom to … oh, whatever the pet insult is this week, I’ve lost track.”

“It’s not murder if it’s execution,” Nephrite growled. “We can arrange that.”

Jadeite half-lifted a hand, that smile managing to grow even more strained. “Executions need trials first,” he said. “That’s the whole problem. Look, we don’t need an answer this second. Let me talk with them. Maybe I can get a story out of them that’s convincing enough Endymion won’t need to hear it firsthand. Then we can just keep them locked away till … well, till whatever happens, happens.”

Zoisite let his fine eyebrows arch upward. “Till Kunzite comes back?”

“Right,” Jadeite agreed. “Till he comes back.”

Nephrite switched his glare to Jadeite. “Or till he doesn’t. Or till he does, and he’s not him anymore. Or till somebody else tries to take advantage of his being away.”

“Or till Endymion comes to his senses,” Jadeite offered.

Zoisite sighed. “Because that’s ever going to happen.”

He was dying.

He accepted this, as he accepted the pain, as he accepted the way his vision betrayed him and the shallow gasps that were all the breath he could bear. He did not accept the weakness of his body; he struggled to stay in the fight, but his limbs did not obey him, his joints folded under his weight. Poison, perhaps. Or perhaps the blade had severed some artery; it seared too hot and too sickening for him to be sure exactly where he was wounded.

It did not matter. The war was still inevitable, but it would be postponed a little while. The others, star-guided and bright-burning and silver-tongued, would have another chance to change Endymion’s mind, and perhaps another after that. Their prince might yet be saved.

Hands found him, and the cold they brought with them was a thing more choking than the pain had been; but he fell into a deeper dark, and perhaps that was a mercy.

He did not know how long he dwelt there, or whether it meant that he was still dying or that he was already dead. Sometimes he had the impression of shapes moving in the void, of a keening lament he felt more than heard, of a distant echo of that vast chill. Sometimes, even in the stillness, he found a way to make himself more still and silent yet—lest a thing far away and immense turn its attention upon him and, in so doing, destroy whatever remained of him and replace it with something of its choosing, something inimical and inhuman.

When they came, the questions did not seem like a voice at all: only something arising out of him, alien to him and yet accepted.

_Do you mean harm to Princess Serenity?_

He turned the question over, turned in upon it, turned it in upon itself. Did he mean harm to the pale little princess? Even asking it amused him, in a detached and uncaring fashion. He’d died for her, after all. But that only dictated what he’d done, not what he’d meant to do in the long run. No, he decided all the same. Not in and of herself. She might die, if it became necessary, just as he had. But he had no malice toward her.

It surprised him, in that same detached fashion, to be so certain that was true.

_What do you feel toward Princess Serenity?_

The question joined forces with his surprise, pressing him to another coiling inward. Exploring what he did feel. She was inconvenient, certainly. Amusing, but many things were that. Frustrating. But those were qualities of hers, not his own emotions. What did he feel?

It wasn’t a question he was accustomed to considering. He floated in the void, part of the void, trying to ascertain what he felt. If he felt anything at all.

The question was patient, but his lack of response lingered on, and eventually it repeated itself. _What do you feel toward Princess Serenity?_

The answer that came to him felt like a true one, even if he didn’t know why, and he yielded it up. _Sorry for her._

The questions stopped, then, and the dark seemed quieter after. Not enough to let him rest entirely, lest that distant immensity begin to become aware of him again. But better than it had been.

Mercury erased the recording from every system but her own, and then erased the traces of the erasure. But on her own she listened to her enhancements of it over and over, filling in variants of the tone that had been missing from the barely-shaped scraps of sound. Trying to learn what the Earthborn man had meant by it.

Trying to determine whether it would be safer, in the long run, ever to let him wake up.

After the third wash, Serenity’s hair no longer bore any detectable stink of the Earthside butchery. Which made Venus simultaneously thankful that the Moon didn’t tend to raise livestock, and much more relieved about the task of combing out the even-more-endless-than-Venus’s-own tresses.

“He saved me,” Serenity said, stretched out on her bed in a fresh white shift, her chin propped on her crossed arms. “We couldn’t just leave him after that, could we? He’d have died on Earth. Mercury says they don’t have the first idea of how to treat—” She made a face and tried to duck her head, but her own wrist was in the way, keeping her from tugging her own hair more than a little. “—that. That if he’d bled to death he’d’ve been lucky, because if he hadn’t it’d’ve been worse. We _couldn’t_  just leave him. So we brought him here.”

“Not that I’m objecting to keeping a pretty boy in the world a little longer.” Venus worked another inch upward in the section of hair in her hand. “But couldn’t you have figured out a way to do it that looked a tiny bit less like kidnapping?”

“It wasn’t kidnapping!” Serenity protested. “We had permission! Zoisite _said_.”

“So they also know where he is and exactly who took him.” Venus sighed. “What are we going to do if he doesn’t make it?”

“Mercury said he would!”

 _Sometimes Mercury tells you things she only hopes are true,_ Venus thought. _Because if she told you the cold breakdown you’d start screaming all over again._  But she kept that one to herself. “Even Mercury isn’t right all the time,” she said instead. “And I know their prince wouldn’t hold it against you, but their prince isn’t the only one involved, is he? There’s going to be other people who know him. He must have some kind of family someplace.”

Serenity set her jaw stubbornly, visible to Venus mainly in the tiny shifts of her neck and shoulders. “He’s going to make it. He’ll be all right. It’ll just take some time.”

Venus considered putting her face in her hands, but decided that stabbing herself in the eye with the comb was less than desirable right now. She didn’t rule it out entirely for later, though.

A tapping at the door distracted both of them, but before either of them could answer, the tapping stopped; the door opened for Mars pushing her way past Jupiter. The second Jupiter had the door closed behind them, Mars announced, “This is the third worst idea you’ve ever had.”

Venus blinked. “You keep a _list_?” she asked with interest. “What’s number seven?”

Mars gave Venus a scathing look, but said, “That time she decided Luna needed to be lemon-scented.”

Jupiter winced. Serenity tried to duck her head again, and this time yelped. “I was _little_ back then, that’s not _fair_!”

“Yes. Twenty-two months ago you were _so_  much littler.” Mars took up another comb, though, and settled herself opposite Venus to start helping with the endless task of keeping Serenity’s hair in order. Jupiter found a third and tucked herself behind Venus. Mars didn’t glance back at her; her attention stayed on their princess. “It’s not just bringing an Earther here for who knows how long. It’s not just sneaking him in. It’s the timing; it’s terrible. You were already up on the planet when I came looking to try to warn you.”

Venus felt Jupiter shift behind her, awkward and a little startled; a quick glance back confirmed that Jupiter’s expression was both surprised and confused. Mars hadn’t been sharing whatever she knew, then. Well, that wasn’t all that unusual. “Did you find another way that this entire situation is actually _worse_ than it looks?” Venus asked aloud. “I thought we were running out of those.”

“I can’t imagine there aren’t four or five more waiting to surface,” Mars groused. “But this one’s … I couldn’t tell you before because I had to take it to the Queen first.”

“You didn’t tell her!” Serenity gasped.

“I didn’t say a word about your idiot kidnapping scheme.” Mars glowered at the back of Serenity’s head. “Because things are bad enough that I didn’t get a _hint_  about your idiot kidnapping scheme.”

Serenity groped awkwardly to try to take Mars’ hand without looking. Since both of Mars’ hands were occupied with her comb and with faintly luminescent silver hair, this was more or less a doomed effort. She found Mars’ knee instead and squeezed it gently. “Thank you!”

Mars grimaced, but like Venus, decided against self-inflicted eye-stabbing and kept her hands away from her face. “Your Highness,” she said—not quite snapping; the touch had done a little for her temper—“this is serious. And, yes, it started _before_  you went up to Earth today; Earthers trying to kill you might be part of it, but you didn’t cause it.”

“Enough _enough_ already!” Venus interjected. “Mars, stop talking around what you saw and tell us what the problem is!”

“I don’t know what it is, that’s the problem.” Mars scowled at the air. “I only know what it does. Listen. A little while back, I started asking the fire what would happen with Earth. I thought I might get hints about how to handle the whole business with their prince. But I got a strange answer. So I tried again, and it stayed. And I went to other worlds. I went home; I visited Mercury and Venus, Ganymede and Callisto. And on all of them, the fires told me the same thing.”

She looked at the length of silver she held; half-turned to look back at Jupiter, drawing her in; finished with a straightforward regard of Venus. “I can’t see reliably forward anymore,” she said. “Because there is nothing left for me to see through, not in all the Silver Millennium. By the time Earth reaches perihelion, all the worlds’ fires die.”


	4. "The end of the world cannot come soon enough."

By the time Zoisite wound his way through the streets, his irritation with the other Shitennou had faded. Not on its own merits. Only because its place had been taken quite thoroughly by the urge to bite a nail to the quick over the even less pleasant discussion awaiting him.

He did, of course, have a last-ditch reserve option if it went so badly as to be utterly irredeemable. But that particular trick could only be used once; and besides, Zoisite preferred to be careful about opening doors he couldn’t close again, particularly if he hadn’t been the one to obtain the key for himself.

The palace was more comfortable than the open air, even at night. The autumn’s dampness and increasing chill were enemies that no guard could hold at bay, but they were opposed by heated air channeled through pipes in some of the floors and walls. At night the fires were allowed to die down, but not completely, and besides, warmth lingered in stone and tile. There was little light in the less-frequented parts of the place, granted; outside of entertainments and private rooms, the corridors were darker than the streets. But a lantern and a little searching led quickly enough to the particular library that the Prince had closeted himself in. The pair of guards outside it confirmed Endymion’s presence fairly well, without actually slowing Zoisite longer than it took to exchange the day’s passwords.

These days Endymion really did stay with other guards more often than not. Zoisite remembered when he’d almost always had one of the four of them by him; only very rarely his only protection, but kept nearby on the pretext of advice and plans. It hadn’t been that long ago, really. Only before the Moon Princess became all Endymion could think about. Not that long ago in the grand scheme of things at all.

Well. Maybe they wouldn’t wind up shouting at each other today.

Zoisite closed the door behind him and paced across the finely patterned carpet, pausing halfway to give a low bow with a graceful flourish. “Your Royal Highness, I beg you forgive the intrusion.”

Endymion looked up from the treatise he was reading, pausing briefly to rub at his eyes. “I’ll forgive the intrusion if you’ll put away the formality,” he said. “I know you eat, drink, and breathe keeping your image the way you want it, but please, Zoisite, it’s just us.”

“Us and those two probably listening at the door.” Zoisite let a sad little smile flicker onto his features, glow for a moment, fade away again. “I can’t honestly blame them, though. Endymion—we’ve got a problem. Kunzite figured out Serenity had shown up down in the town, and took me to go make sure she and her people didn’t wind up in trouble. Except we weren’t quite in time. People went after her.” His hands were already lifting, forestalling interruption. “She’s fine. Her people are fine. Kunzite isn’t fine.”

The treatise already lay closed and abandoned on the desk, and Endymion had come up from his seat, paused three steps toward Zoisite. “Where is she?” he demanded. Always demands, when he was surprised by something touching on someone he was close to. Always, until he had enough information to act. “Where’s Kunzite? How badly is he hurt? Who are these people responsible?”

“We don’t know who the people responsible are yet,” Zoisite said first. “I ran into Jadeite on the way here and sent him down to see if he could find anything out.” Not necessarily the kind of anything Endymion would be expecting, but still technically true, as far as it went. “Kunzite blocked someone trying to stab Serenity. With his gut.” He gestured with one hand, giving a vague idea of the location of the injury. “It looked bad. The … the senshi that were with Serenity took him back to the Moon with them. I didn’t see any other way he’d have been likely to live through it.”

Endymion stared at him for a moment, then relaxed slowly. “Oh. Oh, I see. Everything’s going to be all right, then.”

Maybe, Zoisite considered silently, he’d wildly overestimated the odds of their not winding up shouting at each other today. He was certainly tempted enough to start already.

Their prince took a step closer, then crossed the rest of the distance, lifting a hand to clasp Zoisite’s arm briefly. “If the senshi said that they can put him back together, then they can do it, and they will. And if anyone can find out who was behind the attack, or put the idea in the heads of the people who carried it out, it’s Jadeite. As soon as he comes back, we’ll be able to put an end to this. And as soon as we can get word quietly up to the Moon, the princess will figure out a way to smuggle us up so that we can tell Kunzite in person that we’ve taken care of the problem. And so that we can arrange for there to be familiar faces around for him on a regular basis. I don’t think he’d normally mind being alone with Venus on a regular basis, but she’d probably be a little exhausting for somebody recuperating from an injury like that.”

“A little exhausting?” Zoisite repeated, more than half incredulous. “She’ll be digging at him from the second he can open his eyes, trying to get everything out of him from the disposition of the palace guards to which of our generals have children under the age of ten. Or from before he can open his eyes, trying to enchant him into trusting her more than he trusts us. She calls herself the goddess of love and beauty, but she turns all the love she touches into weapons. There’s no way she’s not going to take advantage of an opportunity like this one.”

Endymion’s eyes widened in startlement; then he laughed, shaking his head. “Zoisite,” he said, and the very gentleness of his voice irritated Zoisite all the more. “If she hasn’t been able to sway him away from loyalty in a couple of dozen encounters in the gardens and at balls, then I’m sure she’s not going to have any luck trying to sweet-talk him while he’s being held together by stitches and the Princess of Mercury and hope. Batting eyelashes at someone in the best of health is one thing. Batting eyelashes at someone who’s in pain every time he breathes is just going to get him to tell her to go _away_.” He sobered at his own words, and shook his head. “Which is the other reason we’re going to get word up there as soon as we can. If we can’t do anything else for him directly, we can at least try to be there, and maybe be distractions for Venus and Serenity when they get a little overexcited.”

A little overexcited. That was one way of putting it. At least it had Endymion pointed in the direction Zoisite wanted him, focusing on Kunzite rather than on the prisoners. The rest would be up to Jadeite: finding out the truth, and then figuring out a story that would cover the inconvenient parts of it. Zoisite made a face all the same. “I’m not going to ask who you’re volunteering to be a distraction for Venus. I just hope you’re not going to expect me to put up with her batting eyelashes at _me_.”

“I would never,” said Endymion solemnly, his blue eyes sparkling bright enough to make Zoisite wish all over again that the dispute between them had never been. That he could step back in time somehow and find whatever it was that made Endymion refuse so stubbornly to look at reality, that made him believe so wholeheartedly in his beloved princess that he believed wholeheartedly in the rest of the Moon as well.

Maybe when he found out what the Moon was undoubtedly doing, or going to be doing, to Kunzite—maybe that would be enough to change Endymion’s mind. Zoisite hoped so. He truly didn’t have any other ideas that might help save him.

Chares’ cramped little prison was not what he’d expected of a cell. The stonework was cold and damp, yes, but he had an escape from that; the bed was rough and the mattress’s straw poked at him, but it was still a bed, and it wasn’t even insect-infested. He’d expected to be sleeping on a hay-strewn floor crawling with six-legged company, and probably with biting flies to go with the biting fleas. For that matter, he’d expected to be crowded in with two-legged company, chained to walls or to who-knew-what. Maybe there would’ve been rats to train to take messages to his fellows on the outside, and to return lugging stolen keys or magical traps.

There seemed to be a definite absence of rats.

He couldn’t be absolutely sure, of course. His head hurt too much for him to be able to focus his eyes very well, and every time he tried to listen closely, the roaring of his own blood in his veins drowned out any chance of hearing any small subtle scratchings. But surely he would’ve noticed a noisy scamper when one or another of the guards came in to ask him questions. For that matter, surely something would’ve run over him by now, or come to investigate the chance of biting off a bit of his nose.

The guards had been nosy as hell, as he’d expected, but he understood what to do about that. He hadn’t admitted anything; he’d given different stories each time he’d been asked. Muddied the waters. They were coming in one at a time to question him, no witnesses, nothing. Stupid of them. Soon enough his head would stop hurting so much, and he’d be able to lunge to his feet and take one of them, make it to the hallway, cause chaos or rescue his compatriots or start a fire.

He’d made it to his feet once. That had been a mistake. At least he’d managed to lose his last couple of meals onto the floor, not onto the bed, and mostly not onto himself. It didn’t even add that much to the stink of the place. Sewage and slaughterhouse.

He was pretty sure those smells came from outside the building, through the high, narrow window that gave him a little starlight. He hoped, anyhow. It didn’t matter. He’d be on his feet and out soon enough. Any time now. As soon as his head had a little mercy on him.

A loud scraping of wood on wood told him the door was being unbarred again, and the lock creaked its turning a moment later. A rescue? Release? More guards?

Another guard, with another lantern. Uniformed, black-haired and bearded, shorter and slighter than the run of them. Chares could take him any time. As soon as he could get up, anyway.

The guard grimaced at the mess on the floor and sidestepped around it in the little empty space that remained, then waited for his companions outside to push the door closed and lock it before speaking. “Your name?”

Chares, son of Charidemus. “Polykleitos,” he said instead. “The Younger.” Was that the third name he’d given, or the fifth? He was pretty sure he hadn’t used it before.

The guard leaned over a little, bracing his hands on his thighs to steady himself as his voice dropped. “Not Pythodoros?”

Pythodoros. The gift of Pythian Apollo— the gift of the sun—

Chares’ eyes widened. Trying to focus on the man hurt, but he tried anyway, and the room did unpleasant things that stonework was supposed to be too stable to do. “What do you know about Pythodoros?” he demanded, hushed in turn, hoping their voices wouldn’t carry past the walls and the thick wood of the door.

“The Sun’s light banishes traitors,” the guard answered, “and the Sun’s arrows slay monsters, Polykleitos the Younger. What monster were you trying to slay?”

Rescue. Not release, but rescue of an entirely different sort. Chares didn’t need a rat to train to haul messages after all. One of their people was right here—

Maybe. He pulled himself back from the edge, made himself think through the pain and the disgust and the swimming of the walls. “Anybody can use pretty words,” he said. “What proof do you have you’ve earned them?”

The guard smiled, just a little, and brought his hands up to his chest. “Good question. Smart man.” His hands came down a fraction.

Caught in the net of his entwined fingers was a little glimmering sphere. If it hurt to focus on the man because of his headache, _this_  hurt to focus on for far worse reasons. Blackness writhed against a poisonous violet light, something that wanted to reach out, to settle into Chares’ mind and heart.

Power. _Her_  power.

Chares breathed, and let himself relax, and the guard folded the Lady’s great gift back into himself and out of sight again. “Now,” he said gently. “Why don’t you tell me everything.”

“It was the shoes that told us.” Chares thought, belatedly, that there might have been a better place to start with ‘everything,’ but he wasn’t a born storyteller to start off with, and right now he was doing pretty well to get words in the right order to begin with. The sentences would just have to take care of themselves. “Pretty shoes. All white and satiny. Nobody with any sense would wear shoes like that in the street. Anybody that wore them at all would have a whole procedure.” Was that the word? Maybe it wasn’t the word, but it’d have to take care of itself, too. “Armed guards, and somebody to carry the money for them, and armed guards for the one carrying the money. Or not carrying the money, just waving a hand and saying to deliver a note later. But this one didn’t have any armed guards, not that we could see; the other one close by her had shoes almost as fancy, all for indoors and for showing off. No pattens between them. And their hems just about touched the ground. No court lady would let her cloak drag, no matter how young or silly she was. So we knew. They had to be from somewhere else. From—you know.” Chares gestured vaguely toward the ceiling. “Up _there_. Spies.”

“Spies,” the guard repeated, nodding slowly. “Was it you that noticed the shoes? Or one of the others?”

Chares grinned, and regretted that too, as the movement of muscle and skin tugged at the back of his head where it hurt the most at the moment. “It was me that noticed the hems. We didn’t figure the shoes till after that. But the cloak could’ve been borrowed, and too long. The shoes, those told us for sure they weren’t from Earth. So we figured we had a real chance. We could do something to show them up there that they couldn’t just take us without a fight. That if they sent their spies down here, we’d find ‘em out and get rid of ‘em. We could give them a good lesson.”

“Were those your instructions?” the guard asked. “To take that kind of opportunity when you saw it?”

“Well—” Chares’ smile faltered, and he scrabbled inside his skull for a moment, trying to figure out what the guard knew, what he’d report, what he’d know later. Too much. The Lady gave him power. He’d find out. So there was no point in hedging. “Not exactly that, but you know. When they told us to wait, they didn’t know we’d find spies in the street, unarmed and not expecting nothing. They wanted us to wait till we could do something real, something nobody would be able to ignore. And that was something real, wasn’t it?”

“It was,” the guard agreed. “It might not have been what She had in mind. But it was certainly real. What went wrong?”

“What went wrong is, somebody else showed up.” Chares folded an arm over himself, grimacing. “There was something else, too, some kind of magic. Fog out of nowhere. But I saw one of the uniforms, a second before the fog covered it, and just between you and me—” He lowered his voice to a whisper, and the guardsman, the Lady’s chosen servant, leaned in to hear. “if I had to I’d swear to it that it was one out of the palace. Something high up, something you see with the royals when they’re being paraded around. So the spies had guards after all. Traitors that are right in with Earth’s own rulers. Either the royal family’s in on it, or the Moon’s set to kill them all whatever moment they please. So you have to take word. Make sure the Lady hears. Or when the time comes, either the whole army’ll be set against us, all but the ones we’ve talked sense into—or we’ll have to save the whole royal family before we can do anything else.”

The guardsman straightened up to run a hand over his beard, frowning, and then set a hand on Chares’ shoulder. “We’ll find out which,” he said quietly. “We have ways of seeing who we can trust. Don’t fear. We’ll see to it that any traitors in the palace are neutralized before they can harm any loyal man. Well done spotting the spies. And well done bringing word of the warning.”

In the next instant, his eyes shadowed with a hint of the writhing blackness he’d brought out into the light before. “But you should have listened to your instructions. The Lady gives them for reasons. And if she chooses to fish you out of this prison … you may find yourself wishing she’d left you to the mercy of the courts after all.”

Chares froze in place, barely daring to breathe till the guardsman was out of his cell. Somehow, the locked and barred door suddenly seemed like a welcome protection.

He didn’t try to ask for the floor to be cleaned, either.

There was a brief delay at the door; Jupiter had to signal Mercury twice, then a third time, before she was actually allowed entry into the sanctum. That was all right. Caution was perfectly understandable, under the circumstances.

As far as Jupiter was concerned, fruit candies and seed-and-nut pastries were also perfectly understandable under the circumstances. Now that the air had had plenty of time to cycle out, she might even have been able to fetch in soup, but for the time being she’d opted to err on the side of things that didn’t have much of a smell.

“Sooner or later,” she announced three steps into the lab, “you are going to have to take a break. Eat something. Possibly even take a nap. I’m not holding out too much hope for the nap yet, but eating something is probably very important.”

“I’m not sure you should be bringing food into a sickroom,” Mercury said, but she’d lifted her head from her displays and was stealing glances toward the tray.

Maybe Jupiter would be able to lure her _out_  for food. That was worth thinking about. “How am I supposed to avoid bringing food into a sickroom if you won’t come out of it?” she asked. “You haven’t set foot outside since we got back. You’re going to make _yourself_  sick if you don’t take better care of yourself. Have you even had any water? You know it’s worse for you than for any of the rest of us if you let yourself get dehydrated.”

Mercury’s shoulders slumped, and she reluctantly stepped away from her machinery; undoubtedly her visor was relaying her the monitors’ readouts, little flashes of light invisible from the outside, but at least she was moving. She took the glass of water from Jupiter’s tray, and a blackcurrant bun. “That’s not fair of you,” she said after a drink. “Normally I’d be able to ask other people to take shifts watching him. But we need to keep his presence here secret. So there’s no-one here to keep an eye out for emergencies if I sleep.”

Jupiter resolutely refused to look toward the him in question. “And if you don’t sleep, then you’ll fall over and there ‘’still’’ won’t be anyone here to keep an eye out for emergencies. Or an emergency will happen and you’ll be too tired to deal with it right. So we need to let you sleep. Can’t you show us what to look for and we can help? At worst we can wake you up if anything happens.”

The mournful look Mercury gave her said more about just how exhausting the day and the surgery had been for her than anything else could. “Can you imagine Venus sitting quietly and reliably watching a whole set of monitors she can’t understand for four hours?” she asked. “Or Serenity?”

The wince at the first prospect was harder than at the second. “Maybe Serenity,” Jupiter admitted. “If it’s important to her. But I, ah, wouldn’t call that reliable, you’re right.” She hesitated. “Could Mars help?”

“I did not stitch him back together just for Mars to set him on fire because she got too irritated at having to sit here alone when she could be doing things.”

Jupiter sighed. “Can _I_ help?”

Mercury considered that, and picked up a crescent-shaped pastry. Jupiter hadn’t noticed the previous bun vanishing, but it had to have gone somewhere, or Mercury wouldn’t have had the hand free. “Maybe you can. You can start by bringing a cot in here.”

Jupiter blinked. “I thought you slept in here often enough to already have a bed.”

“I do,” Mercury admitted. “But it’s a little occupied right now.”

Jupiter grimaced, and set down the tray. “Can we let Mars burn the sheets when this is done, at least?”

“Oh,” said Mercury, “I’m counting on that.”

“I could set him on fire,” Mars suggested, low-voiced to avoid waking up Serenity.

Venus kept her voice quieter still, because their princess had fallen asleep with her head on Venus’s stomach, and while Serenity could sleep through a lot, she wasn’t entirely sure whether bone conduction would be too much of an extra problem. “See, this has all the same problems as cutting his throat.”

“We wouldn’t have to figure out where to bury him.”

“We would have to explain the air pollution. That might be harder.”

“It can’t be _that_  much carbon dioxide. Mercury could come up with something.”

“The carbon dioxide isn’t the problem. The _smell_  is the problem.”

“Nobody noticed the smell earlier. That had to be worse.”

Venus hushed her sing-song to an almost inaudible lullabye of “Still not setting him on fi-ire.” Serenity murmured something that didn’t really work out to words, and groped on the bed till Mars sighed and slid her hand under their princess’s again. “But,” Venus continued, “you’ve got a point. You told her she didn’t cause what you saw.” They never used Serenity’s name when she was asleep right there; half-awake confused princesses were a great way to disrupt conversations, but a terrible way to finish them. “Except that we don’t know if she did or not. Your vision could just as well have been of the consequences of what she was going to decide to do. It could be something he’s going to do up here. I mean, that’s the only other thing out of the ordinary we’ve got to work with.”

“That thought might have occurred to me.”

“Which is why all the suggestions of preemptive murder,” Venus agreed. “Except that for all we know, your vision could just as well have been of the consequences of murdering him instead. That’s the whole problem with your visions. If we just have a _thing_ , we don’t have cause or effect, it’s easy to jump on conclusions and ride them all the way to the wrong finish line.”

Mars was staring at her. Venus smiled brightly, and continued, “So we have to be careful, don’t we? Just like always. We don’t slit his throat, or set him on fire. We just stay _ready_ to. But being ready to means making sure that if we have to, they’ll let us get close enough. So—I know it’s hard—can you try to be just the tiniest bit less homicidal out loud? Just for a little while?”

That won a very soft sigh, almost on the edge of a groan. “You’re not going to make me go play nurse for him, are you?”

Venus fluttered eyelashes at her. “Why not? _I’m_  going to play nurse for him.”

“Yes,” said Mars through her teeth, “but for some reason unknown to the gods and the fires alike, you actually _like_ the smug little stretched-out bastard. The rest of us _don’t_.”

“Oh, I don’t know. She thinks it’s cute the way he gets overprotective of her boyfriend. Hadn’t you noticed? I bet she’d ruffle his hair all day if she thought she could get away with it.”

Mars sniffed. “I bet it’d cut her hand.”

“Because it’s a wig of tiny tiny wires because he’s jealous over her having better hair than he does?” Venus outright beamed. “I have news for you.”

“I have news for _you_. Conclusions are destinations, not horses. You jump _to_  them and you don’t ride them anywhere.”

“Don’t we?” Venus rubbed at her eyes. “He jumped on _some_  conclusion back there, and we’re all riding it wherever it’s going. Even if it’s to hell in a handbasket. Which I’ve never understood, because how do you fit a hell in something that small? Anyway. You’re riding it especially.”

Mars eyed her blackly. “I’m going to regret asking this,” she said. And, without the slightest inflection of a question: “Why.”

Venus smiled at her, three times as bright. “Because you get to be the one to go talk to the boyfriend.”

Mars put a hand up to cover her eyes. “The end of the world can _not_  come soon enough.”


	5. "Not out here."

Zoisite was still gone when Jadeite made it back to the refuge of the library in Nephrite’s townhouse. The only place he knew of that they could be certain nobody else was listening in on their conversations. The only place he knew of that he could remotely consider safe, anymore.

He didn’t really like that Zoisite being gone made that safety feel just a little less remote.

Nephrite handed Jadeite a drink; Jadeite didn’t ask what it was, just took a swallow. Right now, he didn’t care, and the smell of the prison’s even less sanitary neighbors still clung to him hard enough, lurking in the back of his throat, that he couldn’t taste anything but the burn anyway. “Thanks.”

“Figured you needed it. You look like you visited a coffin, not a couple of prisoners. What’d you find out?”

Jadeite shook his head. “They had no idea what the hell they were doing,” he said. “They didn’t have orders. At least one of them was part of Beryl’s group, but that one doesn’t look like he’s got any kind of real position; he’s out at the fringes. I don’t know if any of the others were higher. Didn’t ask. He probably wouldn’t’ve known. They didn’t know who they were going after, either. They figured out their targets were Silver Millennials, but they thought they were infiltrators; they didn’t know they were going after the Princess of the Moon.”

“Wait.” Nephrite put down his own glass, and frowned at him. “Wait. You’re telling me that all of this—the diplomatic incident, the attempted assassination, Kunzite being half-dead and three-quarters kidnapped and going through the stars only know what up there, all of it—was an _accident_?”

Jadeite grimaced. “If you leave your door open and your moneybox on the table, and you come back and it’s gone, is it an accident? We had three high-placed Silvers come down without telling anybody, without getting any help from locals in hiding themselves or learning what to do or how to act, at a time when people have figured out enough about what the Moon can do to hate it, and when there’s somebody smart and charismatic whispering to people that they _can_  do something. The surprising thing is that it hasn’t happened before now, the way Serenity figures rules are for other people.”

The frown evolved to a glower, but it wasn’t sharp-edged enough to be taken personally. “If you put it that way,” Nephrite said, “the really surprising thing is we haven’t had a mob ambush Kunzite before this because of his stupid hair.”

“Not much of a joke. We’re damned lucky we haven’t had anybody get tackled in the street before this. If an example doesn’t get set, we _will_  have more incidents. Not with real Lunarians this time. With people a lot less capable of defending themselves. And we’ll have whisper campaigns about anybody that enough people don’t like. If an example _does_ get set, we’ll have Beryl’s people going after the prisons. And the judge. And anyone else official that catches their eye, or that looks at the problem and decides not to grant clemency.” Jadeite weighed his glass in his hand, and then lifted it toward Nephrite. “Which means that we’re going to be going through a lot of this, because unless we can figure out how to make terrified and angry mobs calm down and listen to reason and back off till we’ve got proof and an effective plan, we are well and truly screwed.”

“You’re good at angry mobs.” Nephrite managed a smirk. “Remember that time with the one priest? The one who said he saw that thing come out of the Sun, and that it was obviously an omen that the Sun had judged us unworthy and that all right-minded people obviously had to help carry out the sentence?”

“Funny how those kinds of divine sentences always seem to involve putting the guy babbling about them in charge of everything.” Jadeite drew the glass back and took another sip, closing his eyes for a few seconds. “Problem is, yeah, I might be able to calm down a mob. Zoisite might be able to sweet-talk one. You might be able to intimidate one. Great. That’s three places we can handle. But we can’t handle them everywhere, and we can’t make it last unless we’ve got better arguments and better plans. And Zoisite can plan for _us_ , sure—”

“But we can’t turn a riot going after us into an army working for us,” Nephrite grumbled. “Yeah, I know.”

“Yeah. Our best shot at dealing with this is out of action. Maybe permanently.”

“Maybe.” They could face the possibility, with just the two of them there. Even Nephrite didn’t _like_ it. But they could look at it square on. Nephrite let the silence drag out for a couple of seconds, giving them a moment to consider it, before he said, “There’s always the other plan. I bet you could handle it, with that.”

Jadeite did not let himself shudder. Not this time. Not with Nephrite watching. “Maybe. I don’t know if that’s the kind of power she was talking about.”

“Well,” Nephrite said, “if all it did was let you animate all the statues in the city, that wouldn’t hurt any, either.”

Jadeite coughed a laugh, even if it was hollower than he liked. “You’ve got a point. But … let’s keep that for if we _really_  need it. I don’t want to be in her debt that deep if we can avoid it.”

He could feel the thing they were talking around, the thing that sometimes he thought he could locate behind his sternum, over his heart; sometimes at his forehead, inside the skull or inside the bone. Even coated like a pearl with layer on layer of his own self, disguised against any possibility of detection, the dormant grain of power at the core of it burned colder than winter ice.

He’d seen Beryl give them to the others; seen the bizarre and twisted violet light, the mottled shadows moving, just for an instant casting their features into something skeletal or monstrous or both before the power was hidden, buried, locked away. He’d used the memory of that to trick the prisoners into talking; he hadn’t, the Sun itself be thanked, had to unlock the power himself. Not yet.

He hoped none of the others had. But that was the problem with things like this. He couldn’t know. And that meant that, for the first time, none of the four of them knew for certain whether the others were telling the truth or lying to them.

Or what they might be lying to hide.

Venus dozed quietly, still pressed into service as a Serenity-pillow. Not that she minded. Not that she ever minded. With Mars gone, it was even quiet, letting her get some actual rest between times of coming half-awake at one tiny sound or other.

“Vee?”

That wasn’t a tiny sound. Venus blinked her eyes open and peered down the length of her body, to find Serenity looking back at her. She looked …

For a moment Venus couldn’t think of the word for it; it was too alien to moments like this. It was something Serenity was in public, in ceremonies, in hard-won decorum. It was—it was—

Solemn. Her expression was solemn, that was what it was.

“I’m right here,” Venus answered, and reached to run a hand gently over Serenity’s braid-tamed hair. “You woke up?”

“Mm.” Serenity rolled over and wriggled her way up beside Venus, snuggling close. “Can I call it a bad dream? It wasn’t, really. It wasn’t even a dream. It was a bad awake.”

“A bad awake?” Confused or not, Venus draped her arm over her princess, then reached to pull up the sheet over her for a little more warmth. All white. Always white, here. “What’s a bad awake?”

“I was sleeping, and then I was awake, and I couldn’t stop—” Serenity did stop; she took a breath, and pushed herself up a little on her elbows, and only then continued. “Thinking about what happened. About those people. They really were trying to kill us. They really would have, if everyone didn’t stop them. Mercury and Jupiter and Zoisite and, and Kunzite. They really almost _did_  kill Kunzite.” Her breath hitched. “That means they really almost did kill me. They really wanted to. And I didn’t even know them, and they didn’t even know me.”

Venus didn’t let herself wince, but she did close her eyes. She didn’t need to see to hug Serenity closer. “That’s why we’re here,” she said softly. “That’s why our job is to protect you. We won’t let anyone hurt you. We just … need you to work with us instead of against us, sometimes.”

“I know you won’t.” A small hand patted at Venus’s, as if Serenity were the one dispensing reassurance, rather than the one needing it. “But I—I don’t understand. Why would anybody want to kill someone they don’t even know? If they know the person, maybe they could just really be angry and not thinking, but if they don’t even know the person, how can they be angry with them?”

This was not a conversation Venus had wanted to have when she was this sleepy. But there was no putting it off, either. “Sometimes it’s easier to be angry with people you don’t know,” she said. “With people you know, even when you’re angry, you remember other parts of them. What they sound like when they laugh, or that time they came up with a good argument for something you wanted, or how they were always daydreaming about their crush ten years ago and writing the _worst_  poetry and wanting you to tell them if it was good enough to send in anonymous notes. You remember dozens and dozens of things, and most of them say it’s not always this bad. With people you don’t know—you don’t have to remember anything. You don’t have anything _to_ remember. And you can tell yourself that you don’t know any good parts because obviously there aren’t any, and you can tell yourself that you can be as mad as you want because obviously it’s all justified.”

“So on Earth,” Serenity said slowly, “there are—people who think I don’t have any good parts?”

Venus braced for a cascade of defensive commentary about Serenity’s hair, or her nose, or her eyelashes. The lack of it left her almost physically off-balance, never mind that she was lying down.

“They think I’m just mean. Or just evil. They think it’s okay to be as angry as they want with me.” Serenity bit at her lower lip. Her eyes were beginning to shine with unshed tears, not for the first time today, not for the tenth. “They think it’s okay to kill me. Because they think there’s nothing good in me.”

“They’re wrong,” Venus answered her, low and almost as fierce as Jupiter could be saying that. “They’re _wrong_. But they think that. That’s why I get mad when you go up to Earth without telling anybody. We’ve been lucky that nothing’s happened before now. We’re lucky that nothing _worse_ happened today.”

“It’s not fair,” Serenity whispered. And then, aloud: “How do we fix it? How do we fix something like that, when we’re not allowed to _touch_  the Earth? When we’re not allowed to go _show_ people that they’re wrong? If what they need is better memories of us, so they know we’re really all right, even if they’re mad at us sometimes—how do we _give_ them that when we’re not allowed to give them _anything_?”

“You need to ask your mother that,” Venus said. “We’re your guardians. We’d do anything for you. But politics is kind of big for us. If even your mother hasn’t been able to figure out a way to fix that one already—how are we supposed to have any idea what to do?”

“Because you _are_  fixing it. Aren’t you? Isn’t that what you’ve been doing with Kunzite?”

Venus froze in the act of lifting a hand to pet Serenity’s hair again. “Um—”

Serenity patted at Venus’s hand a second time instead, finding it without looking. “It’s okay. We keep each other’s secrets. And if you’ve been giving him reasons to think twice about the things he says about us … then that’s a _good_ thing, isn’t it? If he thinks twice about it often enough, eventually he’ll figure out that the things he worries about aren’t true. And people listen when he says things. If he even stops saying bad things about us, it’ll make people feel a little better. If he starts saying good ones, it’ll make people happier with us. And nobody here ever needs to know you did any of it on purpose.”

“Or people will do what Zoisite did,” Venus sighed, “and start thinking we zapped his brain with magic.” She made a face, but turned her hand over to squeeze Serenity’s. “Which isn’t fair. But they don’t know what we _can_ do, so they don’t know what we _can’t_ do, either.”

Serenity lifted her chin, somehow managing to look stout and defensive at the same time. “So we keep working on it! We work on _all_ of them if we have to!”

“Everyone born on the entire planet?” Venus asked. “One at a time?”

Stout-and-defensive compacted slowly into … what was the word the Earthers used? An animal. Donkeyish? Maybe. Immovably obstinate, anyway. Maybe even likely to kick, which wasn’t all that like Serenity. “If we have to,” said Serenity. “We’ve got a long time to do it, don’t we?”

Venus closed her eyes. “Princess,” she said, “we’re not even supposed to _be_ there. Let alone spend our whole lives down there.”

“We could run away.”

“From your mother?”

Now it was Serenity’s turn to go stock-still. “Um.”

Venus kissed her forehead. “Sometimes there are reasons for things we’re not supposed to do. But right now, you’re supposed to be sleeping.”

“Don’t want to.” Venus chorused the words right along with Serenity’s sulky tone. She didn’t manage to synchronize with the indignant noise Serenity made afterward. “You’re awful,” her princess told her, but tucked herself in close against Venus again. Considerably more comfortable than the way she’d fallen asleep. Probably for both of them. “I want to go down and tell Endymion. He needs to know.”

“I sent Mars down already,” Venus assured her. “He’ll know soon. Maybe she’ll have a message from him when you wake up.”

“But that means it’d be late!” Serenity protested. “She might’ve been back for hours by then! And I’d’ve missed it for _hours_!”

“And you’ll have missed it longer if you insist on staying up, fall asleep on your feet, hit your head when you fall over, and wind up in the infirmary next to Kunzite.” Venus paused, then brightened. “I could nurse both of you at once, and save time!”

Serenity blinked. Her expression shifted, very slowly, toward the horrified, before she hastily hid it in a pillow. “I’m asleep!” she yelped, muffled.

Venus tucked the sheet in on her other side and grinned.

Mars flickered into existence in a certain sheltered corner of a certain garden, among the palace’s sprawling grounds. The degree of darkness took her a little by surprise. Clouds. Clouds were annoying. At least they weren’t precipitating all over everything and making her life gratuitously more miserable than it already was.

They didn’t have _time_  for this, dammit. They didn’t have _time_  to be catering to their princess’s pretty pretty infatuation. The well-meaning but barbaric prince of an ignorant planet wasn’t going to be able to do a damned thing to stop a crisis that could take out the entirety of the Silver Millennium in a day, without leaving a single clear hint in her foretellings. They needed to be dealing with that _now_. The Earth could take care of itself. If Serenity stopped careening off to it every time she was left unsupervised for more than half a minute, then nothing on the planet would be able to hurt them at all.

But no. Serenity. And therefore Mars was lurking in a little corner made out of plants trained to grow over _the chopped-up corpses of dead trees_ , and why did Jupiter even like this place again?

At least it was quiet. No sounds of guardsmen on the paths; there were occasional patrols, but mostly they relied on watching the entrances, not the entire great sweep of the gardens at once. No parades of torches lighting the way of some ostensibly notable personage or other, sending up an enormous flare to pull the attention of anyone else in the vicinity. Quiet.

Mars drew a breath, and started on the all-too-familiar path. Here, past the trellises that walled off this nook. Here, in the shadow of the geometrically sculpted hedges, winding her way through a tiny and unchallenging maze. There, the looming dark bulk of one of the fountains, covering her long enough to slip down a staircase into a recessed little rectangle of sleeping flowers. Back up on the far side, wait behind one of the many tall statues of mildly ridiculously athletic men, slip between that one and the female archer (Mars refused to admit a fondness for that one) and into an avenue of slender and elegant trees; stick to the far side of that, then duck aside behind the low wall—

She was wondering which of the guards was on duty at that entrance, and therefore whether she could pass safely the comfortable way or whether she was going to need to climb up to that balcony in high heels _again_ , when a hunch pulled her up short into an abrupt stop.

“I was wondering how long it would take you.” The voice in the darkness was Zoisite’s. Perched, from the sound of it, on top of the wall. Also, from the sound of it, bored.

Mars seriously considered whether she could aim in the dark precisely enough to be able to just set his ponytail on fire. Then again, the way he treated that thing like a planetary treasure, that would probably constitute a diplomatic incident. Awkward, when she was not only not supposed to be here, but was here over something that was in itself not supposed to be happening.

“Not long enough,” Mars said instead, making her tone silken and sweet to match his. “We could probably have left you hanging for another few hours. If we got Serenity to sleep, maybe even a day.”

There was a moment’s pause. “Oh,” Zoisite said then, and disdain filtered through the sound even before he added, “They sent _you_. How pleasant. I suppose it was too much to ask for that someone actually involved with the incident might have deigned to come down.”

“Not a chance. Mercury’s spent the entire time since either in surgery or watching to see how the surgery went. Jupiter’s with her. Which means,” Mars gave a brilliantly edged smile up into the dark, “that I was convinced to grace you with my presence. Not that I was expecting you in particular. Though I suppose I should have. Have you actually told anyone else about the entire thing yet, or are you waiting till someone notices he’s missing?”

Zoisite sniffed. “I waited, of course. Till the ten minutes or so after his disappearance that it took for someone to notice.” There was a faint little rustling sound, that ridiculous tail of hair against the back of his jacket; the source wasn’t moving, so he must have been shaking his head. “Really, did you think we didn’t keep in contact with each other? I hope _you_  keep in contact with each other, at least. _Did_  the surgery go well? Or haven’t you heard yet?”

Mars paused for a fraction of a second. He’d actually asked her a question that wasn’t rhetorical. That wasn’t like him. Maybe they’d finally found something that actually genuinely upset the arrogant, shallow little—no, that way lay thinking about setting him on fire again. And hints of having a personality that was more than painstakingly-unblemished-skin-deep should be rewarded.

But not too much so. “You’re not the one I was tasked to carry information to,” Mars said. “I’m here to talk to your prince, not to his pet favorites.”

“He’s in conference,” Zoisite answered. “You’ll have to wait. Or you _could_  always just tell me, and then you could shake our so-heavy so-terribly-dark so-very-forbidden dirt off your shoes all the sooner.”

“Then I’ll wait,” Mars snapped at him. “But _inside_. Where there is _light_. Not out here.”

Not out in the dark. Not when the dark had been haunting her so much, lately.


	6. "The two of them cheat."

The Crown Prince of Earth was, at this hour, officially asleep. His retirement to his rest had been observed by a small retinue of assistants, guards, and miscellaneous servants, including one guard who actually slept inside his bedroom in case of absolute emergency. There was no question that he had gone to bed, and no question that he had not set foot outside the door since that time, given that more guards would have seen him if the door in question had so much as shifted a fingernail’s thickness.

Officially, the Crown Prince of Earth had most certainly not climbed out of his officially safely unreachable window again, and quite definitely not risked his neck working his way up two floors and over a room to the neglected storeroom off his grandfather’s closed-up chambers from his stint as dowager king. The guard who had been sleeping in his bedroom was one of his Shitennou, likewise officially most definitely not off to lurk somewhere in the gardens in case of nighttime not-exactly-unexpected visitors.

Jadeite reflected that there were sometimes advantages to Zoisite’s habit of taking naps anytime he could get away with it, shameless as a cat. Zoisite was probably just fine tonight, wide awake and alert and not tired in the slightest. Jadeite, on the other hand, was regretting his acceptance of Nephrite’s liquor just a little.

(Except when he thought about what he’d needed to do to convince the prisoners to talk with him. Then the half-sleepy haze seemed like a very small price to pay indeed.)

“What did you learn?” asked Endymion, the seriousness of his expression at distinct odds with the particular unkemptness of his hair.

Jadeite sighed and seated himself on the padded top of a chest. They might be there for a while. “If what I got out of them is true, they didn’t know who their target was. They happened to catch a couple of details about the girls’ disguises, and jumped straight to the conclusion that they were Silvers. Which happened to be true, but there could’ve been other explanations. Didn’t matter. They were looking for a fight, and they were angry about the Moon, and they were angrier about the Moon’s people turning up here. It wasn’t a leak, it wasn’t a plot, it wasn’t some kind of magic identification or brilliant spy network. Just the popular mood cresting for the day at the worst possible time.”

“So you’re saying,” Endymion said quietly, “we were lucky it wasn’t a riot. And it’s probably going to happen again.”

“Yeah.” Jadeite shrugged, more despondent than uncaring. He wasn’t lying to Endymion, he told himself. Not telling all of the truth wasn’t lying. And Endymion hadn’t asked. “There are people whose hair goes white early, sometimes. Look at Kunzite. Sooner or later one of them’s going to be standing in front of a lantern and some drunk is going to decide they’re glowing.”

His prince rubbed at his face with a hand. It was the first time Jadeite had seen him comfortable with looking tired in front of him in weeks. “Not to mention that unit of Venus’s people up in the north. At least they’re far enough away from population centers not to wind up in trouble.” His sigh was almost inaudible. “We need to do something about this. People talking is just talk. Random murder is --”

“Not murder in their minds.” Jadeite slouched a little more, slumping down where he sat. “They think they’re defending the Earth. They think they’re defending _you_. I got warned about possible traitors in the palace.”

If Endymion saw any trace of either the guilt or the morbid humor in that last sentence, he seemed to be chalking it up to the rest of the situation. Jadeite wasn’t sure whether or not to be thankful. His prince just sank back, leaning carefully against the side of a shrouded chair. “I think I’m more worried about the people they’d think of as _loyalists_ in the palace. What do you think we should do with them?”

This time the spark of anxiety was, thankfully, one he had no need to try to hide. “Oh, hey, come on, answering that question is _not_ my job! That’s your problem!”

“Advising me is your problem,” Endymion retorted, but the corner of his mouth curled upward in at least a faint semblance of the more familiar smirk. “So advise, O advisor. Besides, it’s not exactly my problem either. I’m still just the heir. I get sent to slay monsters and avert blights, not resolve legal questions with touchy social consequences.”

“So you don’t actually _need_ me to answer, right? That’s what you’re saying?” Jadeite gave him a quick and honest grin, then sobered, resting both his hands on his stolen seat. Which was undoubtedly getting dust all over his clothes. He’d have to be careful when he left. “I’m not sure. One extreme is judging them guilty of attempted assassination and carrying out the penalty. That’s explosive. The other extreme is calling it a prank gotten out of hand and slapping them on the wrist. That won’t dissuade anyone from trying it again, so that’s also, effectively, explosive. Whoever has to make the call on this one gets to think a whole lot about what options there are between the extremes.”

“Options,” Endymion repeated. “Like only taking off a hand. Or both hands.”

“Ears,” Jadeite offered. “Ears are popular.”

“I’d be really happy if you never called slicing off any body parts ‘popular’ again,” Endymion sighed. “I hate dealing with courts. We’re supposed to be protecting these people, not taking them to pieces.”

“What are we going to do, then, keep them locked up? That costs in food and space and guards, and multiply it out by the number of people you’d have to deal with and you’ve got enough to bankrupt the state in no time. Especially when the harvest’s bad -- you’d have people committing crimes just to get fed, and then your costs skyrocket even more.” Jadeite slumped a little further. “But … yeah. I don’t like it either. Taking someone on in a fight is one thing. Doing stuff like that to people when they’re helpless is … it might be practical, it might even be deserved, but it doesn’t sit right, somehow.”

“I know. I know. I’ve had it repeated at me enough times, imprisonment is a luxury.” Endymion batted a hand at his hair, in a halfhearted gesture toward fingercombing it. “And somehow a fine doesn’t cut it as a penalty either. If it’s big enough to dissuade people… no. These people aren’t nobility. We don’t load them down with debt that’ll haunt them for three generations. There’s got to be other options.”

“I am not looking them up for you,” Jadeite told him. “Sic one of the smart ones on the books if you want to go digging for precedent. Besides. Ultimately it’s the justice’s job, isn’t it?”

“Penultimately,” Endymion said. “Royal pardons happen.”

“You’re not the king yet.”

“But I still need to know what to try to talk the king into.”

“Still not looking it up. Give it to Nephrite, the rest of us have had enough of a wreck of a day.”

Endymion’s smile showed, or half of one, anyway. “That’s all we need. Combining a hangover with legal precedent. That’ll work _great_.”

Jadeite muffled a laugh into an indelicate snort, which he failed utterly to muffle fast enough when the door to the storeroom opened. The hand he’d reflexively clapped over his mouth stayed there as he stared wide-eyed.

They weren’t exactly caught. Not quite. Not when it was Zoisite at the door, carrying a shielded candle, escorting a young-looking woman whose long flow of hair swallowed the dim light up into midnight.

It wasn’t, as usual, anything resembling an appropriately regal locale. But Earth didn’t have many of those, and almost all of them were formal rooms. Official. Not things that they could sneak around in, even Earth’s own prince.

Still, Mars reflected, usually they at least managed a private nook in the gardens, or a place out in some forest, or a quiet library or balcony. This place was all shrouded furniture, paintings propped against walls, dust in the corners, abandoned baskets of who-knew-what, and out-of-fashion ornamental boxes stacked on out-of-fashion ornamental boxes. She had the distinct feeling that if she prodded around carefully enough, she’d run across one or two tiny skeletons of rodents. Or possibly a nest of baby rodents, entirely non-skeletal and squirming over the intrusion. Though, granted, there at least didn’t seem to be any droppings on the floor. Maybe the rodents were waiting for winter to move in.

Joke would be on them, wouldn’t it. From all she could tell, Earth wasn’t going to get much of a winter.

She stepped in far enough to let Zoisite close the door, pivoting so that none of the three Earthers would be at her back. Zoisite’s candle wasn’t much; the oil lamp resting on a table nearby was a little better; but all in all she wasn’t sure they wouldn’t be better off outdoors, for the sake of seeing each other. Starlight might be clearer. Moonlight certainly would be.

Then again, the way Jadeite had his hand over his mouth in apparent shock, maybe she didn’t want them to be able to see her more clearly. Had her outfit picked up some stain in the garden? Never mind. It couldn’t be worse than Endymion’s hair.

“Your Royal Highness,” Zoisite said, his voice the next thing to a fluid purr. “I beg you forgive the intrusion.” Mars wondered why Endymion looked briefly pained at the words, but Zoisite went straight on. “I found Her Grace wandering in the gardens. She indicated that she had word about Kunzite’s condition, but she refused to pass it on to anyone of lesser rank than yourself. It had occurred to me first to wait till you and Jadeite were out of conference, but … perhaps this might not be the best of occasions to be entertaining visitors from the Silver Millennium for any length of time.”

Endymion exhaled, and dragged his hand through his hair. It helped a little. Not much. “No. No, we don’t need another incident, and we certainly don’t need any would-be retaliation. Thank you for bringing her in, Zoi.”

There was a moment’s pause. Zoisite almost visibly regarded the implicit cue that perhaps it might be a good time to leave; if he’d been a cat, he might have batted at it with a paw before abandoning it. As it was, he perched himself on the edge of the same chest that Jadeite had seated himself on; pale lashes caught the light as they fluttered. “You’re welcome, of course, sir.”

Endymion appealed to Jadeite with a glance. Jadeite gave him a helpless little shrug, which died early when Zoisite nailed one of his shoulders down by leaning against it.

Mars stepped in in his place. “Perhaps we might speak in private, Prince.”

“Perhaps,” Endymion sighed, “we might as well talk where we can see the reactions, instead of going somewhere private and having it stay private for thirty seconds until Zoisite sneaks back in and we _can’t_ see his face.”

The most annoying of the three annoying boys in the room gave a little falsely-modest duck of his head; his left hand lifted and flitted in an airy go-ahead gesture.

“Are you sure that they actually work for you?” Mars asked Earth’s ostensible prince. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that one take an order without either ignoring it, twisting it out of shape, or finding a way that it actually secretly meant what he wanted to do anyway.”

“Zoi works for Kunzite,” Endymion joked tiredly. “I just get him lent to me.” More soberly: “Please. Do you have news? Is Kunzite well? When will it be safe to bring him back?”

“He’s not well,” Mars said. “But he’s not dying. Mercury has him held together, and if he’s lucky she’s managed to keep him from getting any fevers from the wound.” Was that the way these people said it? Was it supposed to be in the wound, not from it? Had they figured that much out about infection? Never mind; the last thing they’d expect her to be was a physician. “He won’t be awake for another day or so, your time; maybe a day and a half. I’m not Mercury, but I’d guess it won’t be safe to bring him back for at least another quarter-month, possibly several times that if his recovery doesn’t go well.”

Jadeite winced. “That’s … not going to be easy to cover for him.”

“We’ll think of something,” Endymion said. “If nothing else, we can put you in a wig and have Zoisite steal some of his clothes so his horse thinks you smell familiar. Look, obviously he rode off on some secret mission.”

“One,” Jadeite said, “that’s not going to work that well when people saw him get stabbed. Two, I am not tall enough to pull that off, even at a distance. Three, his horse would _eat me_.”

“Don’t be silly. Your hair doesn’t look _that_ much like hay.” Endymion shot Jadeite a grin as the latter groaned; then he turned his attention back to Mars, serious again. “If I can visit, then I might be able to help with that recovery problem. I can’t make it overnight, but I might be able to relieve some of the strain on his body.”

“You can’t make it overday, you mean,” Mars replied. “Even your people would notice you missing without an explanation.”

Endymion closed his eyes. “I meant, I can’t make him recover overnight.”

“Not tonight, you certainly can’t.” If making him think she was misinterpreting him wore on Serenity’s ill-chosen boyfriend, Mars was all in favor of that. She didn’t have any delusions that it would wear him down enough to derail the relationship, but she’d take her amusements where she could get them.

Zoisite was the one who bridled at that. “What’s wrong with our visiting tonight?”

“The word ‘our,’ for a start,” Mars replied. “Even if I were going to cooperate just now, I wouldn’t be able to take more than one of you.”

Endymion leapt on that. “So you _could_ take me. Tonight.”

_I could take you anytime, except that Serenity would cry every time she saw me for the next century if I brought you to her in an urn._ Mars managed, somehow, not to say that out loud.

Besides, the annoying one was talking again. “Prince, you are _not_ going to the Moon by yourself. That’s the entire problem with Kunzite being up there alone, only doubled and redoubled. We need a witness with you.”

“And I can’t take two. So you’re not going.” Mars gave all three of them a haughty look, never mind that Jadeite had been keeping his mouth shut. The firmer she was about it, the less likely any of them would start asking awkward questions about exactly how their teleportation worked. “Also. Even if I did take you up. Mercury wouldn’t let you near him yet. No visitors till he’s strong enough to be conscious a little while.” _No visitors till we can soak you in bleach, if that brain of hers is working._

“That’s the point,” Endymion protested. “If I can get up there, if I can touch him, I can lend him _my_ strength --”

Mars arched eyebrows at him. “And let him wake up?”

“Maybe. It’s worth trying, isn’t it?”

“And,” Mars said, savoring it, “what exactly would Kunzite do when he woke up?”

Endymion opened his mouth, but didn’t say anything. After a moment he closed it again.

“Sorry,” Jadeite said to the prince. “But I don’t think getting on his feet and demanding his uniform and trying to walk out if they won’t just send him back down here is probably the best plan in the world, right now. I mean, the _real_ point is to keep all his parts on the inside, right?”

“He wouldn’t do that,” Endymion said uncertainly.

“When’s the last time he woke up in a sickbed and _didn’t_ try to do that?”

Endymion’s shoulders slumped.

“So not tonight,” Zoisite said softly, “and not today. Tomorrow night? If two of you come down, can you take two of us back?”

“If.” Mars begrudged the word a little. Well, more than a little. “If he’s well enough. If Mercury and Venus both sign off on it. And _if_ you are quieter than the grave. I don’t care how much Nephrite wants in, he is a _terrible idea_.”

“Of course he’s not going.” Zoisite being offended was, as usual, the quickest thing in the room. “ _I’m_ going.”

“Zoi --”

Zoisite slid off the chest and rounded on Endymion before his prince could start the sentence, let alone finish it. “Nephrite’s not going, for exactly the reason Mars said, and because it’s at _night_ and we need him working. Jadeite’s not going, because we need him doing damage control. I’m the last one Kunzite saw on his side; I’m the one he’ll half expect; my being there won’t set off any alarms for him. And if we come close to getting discovered, I can hide better and faster than any of the others can.”

“And you’re worried that Nephrite and Jadeite wouldn’t be paranoid enough,” Endymion sighed.

“Cautious enough.” Zoisite tossed his head, with an all-too-expressive roll of his eyes. But his hand came up to toy with one of the loose curls to the side of his face, and a little of the edge was gone from his tone. “The word you want is ‘cautious.’”

“The word I want is ‘headache.’” But the prince grinned at Zoisite, and finally let himself look tired. “All right. You and me, tomorrow night.” He glanced toward Mars, almost shy. “If you’ll ask Venus and Serenity if that would be permissible.”

Mars narrowed her eyes at him. “I’ll ask Venus,” she granted.

“Better ask both of them,” Jadeite sighed. “If you don’t, Endy’ll just ask Serenity whether you did, and then, well. You know the drill. The two of them _cheat_.”

It had never occurred to Mars before that one of the Shitennou might find Serenity crying at him as much of a threat as the Senshi did. She decided it was time to retreat in good order while it was still an option.

Except, of course, that she still needed one of them to escort her somewhere that the light-flare of her teleport wouldn’t draw attention.

Dammit.

There was no real rest in the dark, and he was so very tired.

The questions had not come again, but he was not as alone as he might wish to be. When he came too close to the surface, he felt that distant presence searching … not for him, he thought. Not for him. But if its attention settled on him, it would still be too great a weight for him to bear, and lethal all the same.

When he turned himself inward, he felt --

He did not know what he felt, and that disturbed him.

Some of it was familiar. Some of it was the way he gloried in the dark, in the sweet and subtle patterns he could see only then, when the fierce glare of the day could not drown them out. Some of it was pride, was rage, was the way he chafed at the restrictions his duties placed upon him even outside their domain, was the way he burned with anger when he saw fools giving orders and could not countermand them. Some of it was the way he bridled when he saw the Moon, for the power it held over him, for the power it held over his prince, for the power and the knowledge it refused to share and by its refusal branded him and his world eternally the lesser.

Some of it was deeper than all of these things, a consuming vortex of hunger and hatred and arrogance, and he knew that if he drew too close to it -- if he allowed it to draw too close to him -- that, too, would be too great a weight for him to bear; he would be torn apart in the churning of its wrath and its many-bladed joy.

And yet … in its way, that was almost as familiar. And not the least of the dangers that blackness posed to him was the urge to examine it more closely. The suspicion that _that_ was part of him, too.

He tried to seek a middle way between them, and to remain still, to remain quiet, to attract neither of the vast monsters’ attention. But quieting himself took concentration. Neither rising too high nor falling too far took concentration. The more tired he grew, the easier it was for him to sink, sometimes without noticing till his position had decayed all too far.

And he was so very tired.

Relief came without warning. In the dark, suddenly, a beacon: a golden glow like the sweetest hour of sunlight, without sunlight’s harsh and blinding fire. He knew it as he knew his own breath, and he did not question it. He only drew himself closer to it, the dark trailing away behind him under the pressure of its warmth, till at last he could gather himself in its embrace, curl like a child in its protection, release himself from the endless watch and let another take it for him for a while.

It was a reversal of the way things should be, true enough. But that did not matter. Endymion was here. If Endymion were here, then one or more of the others would be as well. His prince could watch over him, and they would watch over their prince in turn.

He breathed, and knew himself to be breathing, and knew that for the first time since he’d fallen into the dark that breath was not an effort.

He slept, and in a gentler darkness bathed in gold, he could rest at last.


	7. "Incidents like this one are so annoying."

Having a bad day was becoming a habit.

At the moment, Jupiter’s particular bad day was trying to take the form of watching three things simultaneously. Watching Serenity’s forbidden darling work magic in the middle of Mercury’s lab, right in front of her. Watching the one of his habitual underlings she most disliked in case he woke up in the middle of it and tried to use Endymion’s working magic to hide working magic of his own (which she didn’t put past him either to have, nevermind they’d never seen it, or to use, nevermind that he was still unconscious after being stabbed in the gut and having subsequent major abdominal surgery to stitch bits back together and stave off gods-knew-what bacterial awful). And watching the _other_ one of Endymion’s habitual underlings in the room perch on the edge of a table with feet tucked daintily beneath him and consider how many of the people in it he could murder at the same time.

At least, she guessed that was what Zoisite was thinking about. What he was probably usually thinking about, to be honest. Which was why she was making sure that there was never a time when he had clear shots at both her and Mercury at once, unless the Earth prince was alert and talking.

Mercury wasn’t being much help, either. Her attention was mostly on her equipment and her displays. Just as if there were nothing at all to worry about from their secret visitors. Just as if they weren’t outnumbered. (If she counted the unconscious one, anyway.)

The problem was that really, Jupiter needed three sets of eyes, and she only had the one. Watching Kunzite got boring quickly. Watching Zoisite made staying productively unsettled relatively easy; his knives the other night were still fresh in her mind. But watching Endymion, who was the one actually _doing_ something…

She glanced over at the prince again. He’d left his armor proper behind, and was dressed in his usual colors: dark blue with traces of silver for contrast, plus a black cloak lined in a startlingly bright red. Add the quiet stark white of the sheets, and all in all, the warm golden glow where his hand rested over Kunzite’s made itself impossible not to notice. Standing out against the dark colors, reflecting off the white and the silver, shading the whole room faintly with the colors of sunlight in Earth’s sky.

His expression was impossible not to notice, too. Almost as soon as he’d made contact, the young prince’s shoulders had relaxed; his head had bent a little toward Mercury’s patient, his eyes gentled, his mouth turned up a little just at the corners. It wasn’t anything near what he looked like when Serenity had fallen asleep against him, let alone when she was awake in the room. But it was definitely a shadow of it.

Jupiter was not a fan of anything, no matter how small, that made her associate _Kunzite_ of all people with Serenity. She wished that Endymion could be looking fond at someone else. Even Zoisite might be an improvement.

“On Earth,” Zoisite said lightly, and for an instant Jupiter wondered if he’d somehow heard her thinking about him, “we have a saying.”

Jupiter eyed him. “I hope you have more than one.”

He flashed her a brilliant smile. “If you keep making that face, it’ll freeze that way.”

Jupiter sat up straighter, starting to bridle, but was derailed by an odd sound from across the room. She turned her head to track it. Mercury had ducked down a little and was staring very intently at a reading, carefully not looking in Jupiter’s direction.

Jupiter’s eyes widened. “Oh, tell me you’re not taking _their_ side!”

“Well,” Mercury said, and took a careful breath, glancing up with a sweet little hopeful expression that was not fooling Jupiter in the slightest. “You _have_ been looking a little upset. Ever since you walked in the room. It might do you a little good to think about something else for a while?”

“Yes,” Zoisite chimed in. “You should think about something else. Tell us what all this equipment does? After all,” and he turned a remarkably coquettish flutter of eyelashes in Mercury’s direction, “if Endymion knows more about what you’re doing, he might be able to support it better.”

“Actually,” the prince in question said, absent and distracted, “it’s the other way around. I’m supporting Kunzite; I’m taking the load of keeping his body working off of him, so that his body can spend its efforts on healing instead of on survival for a little while. I don’t need to know what the rest of this does.”

Zoisite rolled his eyes. Jupiter almost mirrored him—what was the point of his going to the effort when Endymion wasn’t looking at him to see it?—except that she decided hastily she didn’t want to be matching him in anything just now. “Some of this must be supporting him, too,” Zoisite pointed out, “or the Princess wouldn’t be insisting on keeping him here. If you know what it’s doing, you can conserve your own energy by not duplicating effort.”

Jupiter wondered which princess he meant, but decided she didn’t want to ask.

Mercury glanced up again, this time with an apologetic little tuck of her chin and an open, if passing, sadness in her wide blue eyes. “I could tell you what things are doing,” she said, “but the words I’d need to use wouldn’t make any sense to you. And if I explained them, the words I had to use for the explanations wouldn’t make any sense to you. And if I explained _those,_ nothing I said would sound believable, because you wouldn’t have the equipment or the experience to understand that I was describing something real, not making up stories. What I _can_ tell you is that what I’m doing right now is examining what your prince is doing, watching the way that energy flows between the two of them, and looking at the nature of that energy. That tells me a lot about how his healing works. As far as I can tell, it does duplicate some of what my equipment does, but it does it in a way that’s much better for the patient. So I’ve told that equipment to stop working for a little while, and start again when it’s needed.”

Zoisite glanced around at the room with bright interest. “It can tell that?” he asked. “Is it alive, or is it just a natural reaction, the way that fire stops working in a closed chamber, and starts again if you let air in before it dies completely?”

Jupiter bit her tongue on the urge to tell him _oxygen, you’re talking about using up the oxygen._

Mercury only smiled, and said, “It’s like a natural reaction; my equipment isn’t alive.” She darted Jupiter a significant glance while Zoisite wasn’t looking in her direction. Jupiter had no idea what the significance _was_ , but the conspiracy was definitely there. Good enough; she’d ask later. “I’d like to keep monitoring what you’re doing, if that’s all right? We’ve never used this equipment with someone born on Earth before, and the more I can understand about how your bodies heal, the better.”

“That’s all right,” Endymion said, and the smile he offered back to Mercury was a little vague, but not in any way that left the reality of it in doubt. “Anything I can do to help.”

Zoisite tilted his head back and looked heavenward. Jupiter felt an odd little lurch in her stomach at how close that was to the way _she’d_ been feeling lately. She turned her attention away in a hurry, back to the other two she wanted to watch. At least Kunzite didn’t seem to have moved while she wasn’t looking. And Endymion’s attention went right back down to him.

“You really care about him, don’t you,” she said. Then could have kicked herself, when she realized what words had come out of her mouth.

Endymion smiled again, anyway, though he didn’t look up this time. “He’s one of the four people on Earth I trust most. More than my family; my family’s too mired in politics. I guess all royal families are.”

Jupiter shifted uneasily, weight moving from one foot to the other. “I guess,” she said. “I just don’t see why … well, why _him_ , out of all the people you have down there.” Not that he was the only one of the Shitennou whose being there confused her. Jadeite was all right; she could deal with him. Nephrite made actual sense. The two actually in the room with her at the moment? She didn’t think she’d ever understand why Endymion wanted them around.

Unless, she amended to herself a moment later, it was to have someone there who could actually set people on fire by glaring holes in their back. Not that she’d let Zoisite behind her, not with Mercury distracted, but his scowl was fierce enough she had to keep repressing the urge to check her side for scorching fabric. And reminding herself that the little bit of magic he had was a long, long way from what Mars could do even with just a casual point of a finger.

This time Endymion glanced up at her, and there was still a smile there, but it was wistful. His own blue eyes had the sense of water someone was drowning in. “He almost got himself killed protecting someone he didn’t think I should be involved with, who was doing something she wasn’t supposed to, just because I care about her. He didn’t have to. His job didn’t call for it. But I love her, and no matter what he thought about it, he treated her like he’d treat me. Doesn’t that explain it to you by itself?”

Jupiter hesitated. She glanced over to Mercury, who was still absorbed in her readings; to Zoisite, who’d dropped glaring at her in favor of watching Kunzite himself. The gentler expression he was wearing seemed out of place on him, to her. “No,” she said finally. “Because I don’t understand _why_ he did that. He hates us.”

Zoisite made an impatient gesture, a little left-handed spiraling thing. “He hates you _professionally_ ,” he said. “Not personally. There’s a difference for him.”

Endymion took a moment to get his own expression back under control, but succeeded at least in not laughing. “I wouldn’t call it hate,” he said. “At least, I don’t think I would. He’s angry, and I don’t think he really thinks straight about the Silver Millennium. But Zoisite’s right, it’s not personal. He likes you.”

“He _what_?” That was probably not on the list of things someone was supposed to say to foreign dignitaries. But if anyone was really worried about that, Jupiter thought, they shouldn’t’ve left her alone in the conversation. “He does not! That’s about the farthest thing from whatever he thinks about me!”

“He likes you,” Endymion repeated. “Not the way he likes Venus, but he likes you, and he likes Serenity. He likes the people Nephrite and I are when we’ve been around the two of you. He likes what that says about you, and how you treat Nephrite. He doesn’t _want_ to be fighting with you. He just—” The Earth prince shrugged, something Jupiter wasn’t used to seeing from him with the way the quasi-armor that was practically his uniform was designed. “Thinks he’s obligated to. He does a lot of things because he thinks he’s obligated to. He’s been fighting with me over things for months. I understand how hard it is to see through that. I’d just about figured he’d given up on me, until I touched him just now; he’s too tired to fight, so I can see how he feels underneath it.”

“He wouldn’t give up on you,” Zoisite said, low and fervent. Jupiter wasn’t sure whether it was the prince or his patient that drew that tone out of him.

“No. I can see that now.” Endymion hesitated, then glanced back at Zoisite. “Do you want to come sit with me? So you can see it too?”

The only answer Zoisite gave was a little shake of his head, curls fluffing out to the side for a moment. He didn’t say anything out loud.

“That seems a little like an invasion of privacy,” Jupiter offered, hesitant and off-balance.

“It’s Zoisite,” Endymion answered, as if that were an explanation.

Jupiter started to object, but considered how often she’d used ‘it’s Venus’ in a similar fashion, and closed her mouth again.

Mercury smiled at her readings, and didn’t raise her head.

There were three, count them, three Earthborn nobility or royalty illicitly on the Moon by Princess Serenity’s secret orders at that very moment. So of _course_ Venus was standing before the Queen.

Fortunately, Queen Serenity didn’t seem too terribly concerned about details like looking at the Princess of Venus. She stood instead with her hands on a balcony’s railing, her head tilted upward the way her daughter so often stood. Except that unlike her daughter, she was regarding not the bright vision of Earth but the far more distant stars.

“Has Sailor Mars told you about her vision?” she asked.

Venus curtsied for the third time in the last three minutes, as reflexive and as graceful as the first. “Yes, Your Majesty. One turn of Earth ago.”

“Good.” The Queen stood silent for a moment longer, then let her gaze fall and turned her head to smile at Venus. Despite the topic, it was sweet, warm, affectionate. “Your duties remain the same, as always. As far as you are concerned … if the fires of the worlds die, then very well; you will have Mercury make a lens and use the sun’s light to boil water. The worlds are my charge. The princess is yours.”

Despite her best efforts to look fierce and disciplined and solemn, Venus found her expression almost mirroring the Queen’s. “Yes, Your Majesty. We won’t let ourselves get distracted.”

“Good. That said—” The Queen turned back to the view she’d chosen. “My concentration must be on understanding that problem. But there is never only one thing wrong at a time. I can feel something gone astray here, on the Moon. It is very small, and very subtle; but many great things begin that way. So I ask. Venus, in the course of your duties these last weeks, have you come across anything gone wrong, outside the ordinary?”

For an instant, Venus stalled. Anything gone wrong. Only everything. Only people attacking the princess and almost getting away with it. Only the situation in Mercury’s lab. Only Serenity wailing so loud people could probably hear her across the vacuum of space.

But Serenity sneaking down to Earth, and sneaking Endymion and sometimes some of his Shitennou up to the Moon, wasn’t exactly outside the ordinary. Was it? Outside the proper, yes. Outside the legal, well, hard to say. Outside what was supposed to happen, definitely. But it’d been going on so often, it _was_ practically ordinary by now.

Confident in telling the absolute and perhaps overly precise truth, Venus lifted her chin. “I don’t have any knowledge of this thing you sensed, Your Majesty.”

The Queen’s smile reappeared, much smaller, just for a moment. “I see,” she said, and Venus had the abrupt sinking feeling that they weren’t fooling her in the slightest. “If you should come across any such knowledge in the course of your duties, please report it at once. I don’t ask for you to report guesses, or surmises, unless they’re backed by enough evidence to give you great confidence in them, or you and Mercury both reasonable confidence. But if you see anything you _know_ is wrong … please share that news. At once. No matter how small.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” Sometimes, it was best to fall straight back on the only thing it was always safe to say.

“And please send Luna in if you see her.” The Queen tilted her head in quiet dismissal, the tails of her hair swaying gently.

Venus retreated, carefully and politely and with all etiquette and absolutely not fleeing at all, before the ruler of the entire Silver Millennium could say anything remotely resembling ‘go play.’

There was still a definite absence of rats.

Chares trusted that his rescue, or the dismissal of charges against him, would take place long before the food he was given reduced him to _longing_ for rats. Though, now that he came to think of it, he couldn’t remember any normal people who’d actually been held in prison for that long. All the stories about people locked in for months or years or worse were about the highborn. Normal people got held for a few days while their stories got straightened out and the witnesses tracked down, then either released or dragged into court. A few days of bread and water couldn’t be that bad. It wasn’t even bad bread. And the water didn’t seem stagnant, or tainted, or …

He tried not to wonder where they got the water from. Not when he had the constant reminders of what lay either side of the prison. He’d’ve thought that the smells of slaughter and sewer would have faded by now, but he hadn’t taken into account the wind; every time the wind changed, it changed the mix of the two, and whichever one had strengthened came right back into his awareness.

To be honest, he was starting to get sure that if he lost his head in the cell, it wouldn’t be from the confinement, or the food, or anything else. It’d be from the damned stink.

Still. It’d been more or less a day since he’d been contacted, anyhow. He was pretty sure. Time played tricks in the place already. Maybe they’d contact him again. Maybe they’d save their intervention for the court—or maybe they were already working it there—or maybe—

The door opened.

Chares was off of the straw mattress so fast his head cracked against the low ceiling; he swore and grabbed for his skull as the pain fired up both where it’d hit and where it still hurt from the fight. Then realized belatedly that left him open. Then—wondered why he even cared. He’d missed the sound of the key in the lock. That was all. He had to have missed it. It obviously had to have been there.

Only one guard, again. They’d come in pairs, or at least pairs was as much as he could see, when they brought the food. It was just when they wanted to ask questions that they were alone. This one was the most slightly built he’d seen, light-haired and finely featured. Nobody’d ever broken _his_ nose. It almost surprised Chares that he was willing to risk that face, or those slender bones.

“The Sun’s light banishes traitors,” the man said, his voice not deep, but commanding.

“And the Sun’s arrows slay monsters,” Chares agreed before he could think through the pain in his head. He frowned a moment after, trying to piece together whether he should just accept that, or whether he should challenge it. They’d come to talk to him before. It must be all right. Of course it must. No wonder this one wasn’t worried about his tackling him.

Maybe this one had come to take him away.

The man regarded him for a moment, then said in that same almost-unquestionable tone, “Tell me what happened.”

“What?” Chares said, confused. He was almost sure it was the order that did it, not just the way the room wanted to swim a little.

“The fight,” the man prompted. “The one you were arrested for. Tell me what happened.”

“But I already reported.” Chares frowned a little. Somehow, this one he didn’t want to ask for proof. “I can do it again, if you want—”

The man’s eyes narrowed at the first words, and the air seemed to congeal under his displeasure. The next made him relax a trifle, though there was something else in his manner now. Something like a gaze-hound, or a hunting cat. “I do. Tell me about it.”

The words spilled out of Chares’ mouth before he could work out what he wanted to say, or whether he wanted to say anything. He told the story again, not in the same words as before, but close enough to them; it unwound from him with barely enough of a pause to fill his lungs. The women. The unlikeliness of them. The conclusion they’d come to. Their offense at the children of other worlds setting foot on theirs, spying on them, daring. The attack. The fog. The uniforms from the Palace. Ultimately, the failure—but the lack of regret.

And then, though the man had never said a word about it, he found himself telling the story of the last time he’d told the story. The man like this one, in a guard’s uniform but knowing the right words. The uncanny bead of power he’d drawn from his chest, the certain sign of his being in the Lady’s trust. The warning the man had given about his moving without instructions. And the quiet thereafter.

After that, he could fall silent. After that, he could breathe when he wanted to again, not only when he had too little air left in his lungs to support the words.

The first one had frightened him badly enough. This one hadn’t done a single thing to show any power. He shouldn’t be more afraid this time. But—

The first one had shown power that threatened to wind its way into Chares’ mind and heart. This one—this one only _did_ it. Without any power being visible at all.

“Well,” the guard said, slowly, and Chares prayed numbly to the Sun for what the rest of the sentence might be. “Well. It seems there hasn’t been a disaster after all. You spoke to one of us; the word simply hasn’t had time to make it back through channels.”

That reclaimed breath shuddered out of Chares’ chest, hard enough that his shoulders sagged and his head drooped. If the first one had somehow been a fake, it might have been very bad for them all. (He did not doubt that this one was real. This one could prove to be a Silver in disguise, and he would still believe this one was real; easier to believe a Silver changing sides than to disbelieve that voice.)

“And, unlike what the other seemed to believe, I myself think you’ve done something that may be very useful. You’ve moved earlier than might have been best, but not so early that we can’t do something with it. Indeed—” The guard smiled. “You and yours may just have struck the first blow in a war for our freedom. A war to drive the Moon and its pawns off of our world for ever. Well done. And deserving of reward. We need a symbol to drive our people on, Chares. I think your name will do.”

Chares blinked. Then risked, however tentatively, a smile. He almost tried to say something.

When the unsettling almost-silver light glittered from the door, and he heard the lock snap shut without benefit of key, he stopped.

When the guard spread his arms and the tendrils of poisonous violet light writhed out from around his body, Chares did not say anything at all. That same compulsion took his throat and prevented him from screaming, not as terror seized him, not as his strength deserted him, not as his flesh withered and melted from the bones.

He felt himself pulled from himself. He felt himself die.

The guard’s hand closed around the last flickers of his awareness. “Not much,” he murmured, “but you’ll do. And perhaps Pythodoros will be pleased enough with you to give us a way to deal with Jadeite’s little independent streak. Incidents like this one are so annoying.”

For a little while, what remained of him was carried. And when the hand holding him opened, what happened to him was far, far worse than the death of his body had been.


	8. "Whatever did this, it only affected the man."

Nephrite scowled up at the Moon, watching them pale and baleful, and wished Endymion and Zoisite would come back. Their prince was aggravating as all hell these days, but for all they’d taken to staying separated from him when they could to keep from fighting, being on a different celestial body was a little _too_ separated.

And he hated it just being him and Jadeite on Earth. He could make plans for himself, and Jadeite could make plans for getting in trouble, but all the people who could swing the guard into the right action in an emergency or suss out a secret hidden weakness in an instant and position them to take advantage of it—all of them were off the planet. If a real emergency came up, there was a very good chance that, until they could get word to Elysion and get instructions and reinforcements back, they’d be screwed.

A real emergency, mind. Not something the locals could handle. He had to keep reminding himself that the locals could handle most things.

He growled to himself and pulled his attention back away from the Moon, frowning over at Mars’ red-scorched glint. He didn’t like the alignment to Antares. Not that anybody could see Antares right now, but he didn’t like _that_ , either—its close association with the Sun made him uneasy. He hated this time of year, when war and their prince’s protector dwelt so close together.

Tell the truth. When war and Venus dwelt so close together.

And Endymion was up on the Moon, where Venus could reach him.

(But Venus could always reach him. Because the Senshi could come down to Earth in the blink of an eye.)

He heard the footsteps approaching, but paid them little mind; his eyes would be better in the dark than any attackers, and the odds of it being an attacker were low. An attacker would sneak. This one was hesitant, but not trying for silence.

“My lord Nephrite?”

Nephrite recognized the voice. An attacker only on his ability to concentrate, then.

The footman did not shift his weight, or otherwise fidget; that at least was commendable. After a moment, he coughed slightly. After several more moments, he repeated, “My lord?”

Someone thought whatever it was was urgent, then. Nephrite glowered at the man for the interruption anyhow, but relented the barest minimum. “Yes?”

 _Now_ the man bowed. A little late. But Nephrite couldn’t entirely blame him for waiting till he knew Nephrite would see it. “There is a messenger, my lord. From the constabulary. She says it won’t wait till morning.”

Nephrite’s eyebrows lifted. “Really. I wonder if that prisoner Jadeite was interested in came up with something new.”

The footman found the pattern of stones and shadows between them excessively interesting. “No, my lord. If I understand correctly, someone is dead.”

Nephrite’s breath stilled for an instant—but only an instant. The constabulary. Someone in the city.

Not Endymion, then. Not Kunzite either, but not Endymion, not this time, not yet.

“I’ll meet with this messenger, then,” Nephrite said, and suited action to words, starting toward the entrance to the building from the rooftop garden. Halfway there the image struck him. Jupiter had been in the city before. Jupiter might have come back to the city again—

He dismissed the sudden worry as ridiculous. But he took the stairs three at a time, all the same.

For the forty-seventh time, or what felt like it, Zoisite leaned in to examine Kunzite’s unconscious form. Slow, shallow breathing; he hadn’t been skipping breaths altogether since Endymion took his hand, at least. Pale under the dark skin, leaving him an unsettling color, particularly around the lips and beneath the eyes. Unmoving. Fingers limp under their prince’s.

“Why isn’t he awake?” Zoisite demanded quietly. “He should be up and around by now. I’ve seen you take people from half-dead to demanding liquor in this much time.”

“By ‘people,’” Jupiter asked skeptically, “do you mean ‘Nephrite’?”

Endymion’s lips twitched. “Not this time,” he said. “Nephrite usually keeps people trying to kill him about six feet away, one way or another, so he doesn’t get hurt as much as you’d think.” He sobered again, though, and turned those impossibly blue eyes on Zoisite. “I don’t know why he isn’t awake. It feels like there’s something complicated going on, and I can’t see all of it. That’s why I’m supporting him instead of trying to fix it directly; his body probably knows what it needs to heal in which order better than I do, right now.”

“Something complicated?” Zoisite pursed his lips, and fidgeted with a curl. “He got stabbed. Stabbings are pretty straightforward. It should only be undoing one cut.”

“If human bodies were made out of wood,” Mercury said without looking up, “it would be. But human bodies stretch, and tear more, and rearrange themselves inside. And certain things take time; there’s a race between fever and the medicines we use to stop the fever going on.”

Zoisite turned that answer over. The shape of it wasn’t quite right. Mercury wasn’t looking at them, for one thing. Not a perfect tell with her; she was shy enough that sometimes she wouldn’t look for no reason—but then she’d usually steal a glance or two to check reactions. Perhaps she was too busy. But it didn’t seem likely, not in this instant. And it had the sound of being just enough truth to dissuade further query.

So of course he challenged her. “If you had someone from the Silver Millennium for a patient right now, would you expect _him_

_“Zoisite!” Even without turning his attention from Mercury, he could feel Endymion’s scolding look. “We’re guests, and they’re doing us a favor! That’s not how we should be behaving!”_

__

“If you wanted politeness,” Jupiter suggested, sounding a little sourly amused, “you should’ve brought Jadeite instead.”

Mercury wasn’t saying anything; she was focusing, exquisitely politely, on her displays.

Which of course meant that yes. Yes, she would expect someone from the Silver Millennium to be on his feet. Did they heal better than the disdained, short-lived barbarians from Earth? Zoisite didn’t have much to go on, but he considered the scratches that the Moon’s princess had picked up early on, when she’d learned the same way every child on Earth learned that roses might be lovely and might have soft petals and a delightful scent, but needed to be treated with a certain amount of caution and respect. They hadn’t sealed over instantly until Endymion took care of them for her. Possibly the Silvers healed faster, but not so much faster as to be evident in that short a time. Or possibly, for all their vaunted lifespans and power, they healed at the same rate.

In which case, he was right: Kunzite _should_ be up and around by now. Something was slowing it down.

“I certainly wouldn’t expect him to be walking today,” Mercury said at last. “We do usually try to have people sitting up as soon as possible after surgery like this. But ‘as soon as possible’ varies a little. This … was a little bit more of a mess than we’re used to seeing.” Her voice faded in those last words, as if even the understatement were more than she really wanted to say aloud. “Fighting the fever can’t be helping.”

“But Endymion should be taking care of that,” Zoisite said.

“Now, yes,” Mercury agreed. “But not all day. Not till you got here. I think … he wasn’t really healing, then. Just treading water, more or less.”

Zoisite smiled, slowly, and tilted his head just enough to let the lights glitter off of his eyes. Pity Mercury wasn’t looking. Jupiter wasn’t at the right angle to get the full effect, but she got a little, and scowled at him gratifyingly. “So,” he said. “There’s no real reason for him to be staying _here_ , then. He can not-heal just as effectively on Earth.”

“Zoisite,” Endymion sighed, but there was no follow-up to the protest this time. Possibly their prince had resigned himself.

“That’s not exactly true.” Mercury did glance up from her displays now, a little too late for Zoisite’s tastes, but at least a signal that she was taking the conversation seriously after all. “On Earth, he’d be not-healing _with_ Endymion’s help. The rest of the time, he’d be getting worse. Once he reaches a certain point of stability, we’ll send him home with you, I promise. With detailed instructions on what will need to be done for his care, and what he’ll need to do for his recovery.”

Endymion managed to figure out where his smile had gone and bring it back for a moment. “Wait,” he said. “Are you telling me that you’ve finally figured out the way to make Kunzite a bearable patient? By having people on a different planet be the ones telling him what to do?”

“Well,” Mercury admitted, “I did think it might help if it were someone he’d actually listen to telling him how far he needed to walk on a given day.”

“You have the wrong idea,” Zoisite said. “Try writing instructions telling us when we need to _stop_ him walking. Or doing whatever else. Half the reason I’m startled he’s still in bed is that I’d expect him to be trying to _crawl_ back to report in, if he had to. Across the entire atmosphere if necessary.”

“Oh dear,” Mercury said, her tone curiously flat. “I’ve never heard of a patient like that at all.”

Jupiter … twitched. “That is _not_ fair!”

Endymion brought his free hand up to cough politely into his sleeve. Politely, but not convincingly. He deflected attention by bringing a wide-eyed glance up and over to Mercury, clearly appealing to authority—authority in the room they were in, at the very least. “Are you sure that’s why he’s healing more slowly, though? The scale of the damage, and the fever, nothing else? Is there anything I can do to help more?”

“Not without exerting yourself enough to draw attention,” Mercury answered. “We don’t want this room to draw attention; as long as the profiles stay within what people are used to from my experiments, it’ll be all right, but if they exceed that, then we’ll have visitors in very short order. They’ll think I’m doing something that’s gotten out of control.”

She did not look at the expression Jupiter was making at her.

Zoisite did not make a similar one at her … but only because he didn’t want her to notice that he’d noticed her only answering one of the questions.

“Serenity,” Mars said through gritted teeth, keeping her arms spread to either side and gloved hands physically gripping the doorframe, “the entire point is to give him uninterrupted time. _Uninterrupted._ That means _not_ being bodily tackled and ripped away from the patient he’s supposed to be healing.”

Her princess gave her a shocked look through her (inevitable) tears. “I wouldn’t! I would never!”

“And that is why you are waiting until _after_ the work part of the visit is done to have the cuddle part of the visit. And the staring dreamily into each other’s eyes part of the visit. And the sighing part of the visit. I am sure there will be _plenty_ of sighing.”

Serenity sniffled. “I just want to see him while he’s here.”

“You just want to see him while he’s not here, too,” Mars muttered under her breath. If Serenity was going to cry on her again, she might as well earn it.

The messenger stood well back, her duty technically done once she’d guided Nephrite and Jadeite here. Nephrite suspected she wouldn’t miss the rest of this for the world. Or at least for gratification of her apparently not-so-secret curiosity and fascination with horror. Maybe he should see if she were interested in a transfer to something more related to monster-hunting than to maintaining a watch on the city.

Later. Later for all of that, if he happened to remember. For now, their problem was the door.

Faint silver light glimmered from its keyhole, blocking any attempt to open the lock the usual way. More tiny crawling embers made shadows do strange things inside the gouges where the guards had tried to hack through the wood with axes. Magic. Of course they’d called for the people who dealt with magic.

The problem was, this was Kunzite’s kind of puzzle. The stars were no help with this. And Jadeite’s alchemy… “Can you make something to dissolve the lock around the barrier?” he asked, low-voiced.

“Maybe, but I’m not sure we’d want me to,” Jadeite muttered back. “It might take the floor with it, and I don’t know what’d happen if stone melted and dripped onto somebody’s head.”

Nephrite growled, then broke a splinter off the door and prodded at one of the ax-marks. “We could try to focus force into one place. Use a spearhead. See if we can overpower it locally and break it down.”

Jadeite said, “Or we could take what they tried to do with the hinges a step farther.”

Nephrite squinted at him. “The hinges have the same magic on them. They couldn’t take them apart.”

“Right,” said Jadeite. “But did anybody try taking apart the _wall_ yet? Because I bet that that spearhead idea of yours would work faster on the mortar than on the barrier. And it’d only take a couple of bricks.”

Nephrite paused. “ _You_ get to take out the lower one. You’re short.”

Jadeite said, solemnly, “I will do my very best.” He paused. “It’s not my fault that my very best is still going to be worse at it than you’d be able to manage doubled over. _And_ hung over.”

“You’re not getting out of it that easy.”

It took time. It took more time than Jadeite wanted to think about, even after he conscripted a couple of too-interested guards to trade off with them. It did not involve a spearpoint; it involved chisels and heavy hammers, fracturing and removing parts of the wall on both sides of the door, till the hinges and lock were both free and the whole thing could be hauled out of the way.

By the time they were done, that the door spat silvery sparks as they dragged it across the floor was simply something to be taken for granted.

The body inside, though—

Once, Jadeite had seen a body hauled out of a swamp, in remnants of clothes (and, more disconcertingly, in jewelry that no-one had saved or stolen) that had been out of fashion a Silver’s lifespan ago. The water had mummified it, reduced it to bones covered by wrinkled leather, sunken shadows of eyesockets, a lizardlike but oddly prim mouth. The bizarre thing had haunted his dreams for months.

This one looked something like that. If someone had made that one into a candle, then lit the wick and let it burn long enough for the tough gray-brown stuff that had once been skin to trickle away, to sag off of its skull and solidify in hanging loops—

He turned away fast, retreating to a half-safe distance, gasping for air, trying to figure out if he dared to swallow or if that would be the last thing to put his rebelling stomach over the edge. One of those too-interested guards was fighting the same battle, and audibly losing; the other one had retreated along with them.

Nephrite. He didn’t hear Nephrite.

When he dared turn around again, Nephrite had stepped inside the cell, and was examining where the distorted and dead thing was half-propped against the bed.

He didn’t need to look back to know that Jadeite was paying attention again. “It didn’t burn,” Nephrite said.

“What?”

“The mattress is straw. If there had been fire, it would’ve burned. If there had even been much heat, it’d show the effects. But there’s nothing. Whatever did this—it only affected the man.”

 _Beryl?_ Jadeite thought first. But his eyes tracked to the door. To the fading hints of silver.

To the magic.

Suddenly, he wished even harder that the others had come back by now.


	9. "Story of my year."

There was only so much time they’d have. Endymion planned to snatch as many stray moments of sleep in the day as he could, but he still had to be back _for_ the day, back when people would be expecting him to emerge into public, back before any helpful functionaries came to declare his schedule (in case he’d forgotten it, which he never did, except for the times it was on purpose) or to announce that his bath was ready or any of a thousand other tiny things, most of which struck Endymion as unnecessary for any purpose except ritual.

He knew that, when trying to keep something with so very many moving parts going, ritual was necessary. But he didn’t have to _like_ it. Every time, he’d rather be out with a small enough group that they could do things on the spur of the moment. Better yet, with just the Shitennou, or best of all with them and Princess Serenity and the other princesses who surrounded her.

When they were actually _there_ , sometimes even Kunzite unbent from the misplaced anger he and the others seemed to bear the Moon, and was more like the person Endymion remembered. Sometimes. Other times, Endymion had almost begun to give up on seeing him again; all they seemed to do anymore was fight, or bicker, or shout.

Not now, though, and that was a part of why Endymion was stalling, not getting up even though it had to be time. If he wanted to see Serenity at all, he had to leave now. Or at least—very soon.

The problem was … much as he wanted to see her, he also didn’t want to go.

His psychometry was erratic, unpredictable; but when he bent his powers to healing, its aspect as empathy almost always surfaced. He could feel Kunzite there, not conscious, but not entirely unaware. Aware of _him_ , definitely. Of Endymion. And not angry at all.

When he wasn’t awake, Kunzite still cared about him. Found peace in his presence. Wanted to be near him. Endymion was just selfish enough not to want to lose the feeling of that.

But there was only so much time.

He exhaled, slowly, and began to extricate himself; the quiet golden glow that surrounded his hand on Kunzite’s dimmed accordingly. That sense of secondhand peace dimmed, too; the uneasy restlessness was vivid enough in Endymion’s mind that the room’s quiet suddenly came as a surprise. There should have been motion. At least the sheets rustling, but there _should_ have been sound from the mattress as Kunzite sat up, a faintly harsher breath to go with the frown at him, a question in a familiar low voice.

Instead, there was nothing. Kunzite did not move, did not come to. Only lay still, even as the weight of keeping himself breathing shifted back onto him, and onto the Princess of Mercury’s machines.

Endymion reached up with his free hand and touched Kunzite’s cheek; his emotions settled a little, back toward rest, and Endymion unwound himself the rest of the way still more carefully, finally rising and letting his fingertips trail away.

He glanced sideways toward Jupiter, then turned to face her fully when he found her watching him. “You said that Princess Serenity would be waiting when we finished,” he said quietly. “May I see her? Is there still time?”

Jupiter’s jaw set in just a little hint of stubbornness; she glanced toward Mercury. “I still don’t like it,” she said.

“I’m sure Zoisite doesn’t either,” Mercury said absently to her displays. “After all, he has to choose which way he’s going to go: to stay with the person he didn’t want to be here alone to begin with, or to stay with his prince.”

Zoisite made a little _hmph_ sound and recrossed his legs, tipping his nose into the air as he did and letting the tail of his hair tumble artistically down his back. “There’s no decision to be made there. If anything goes wrong, your princess will be high-pitched enough, she’ll break glass all the way to here.” The wording was half an insult; the laughter in his voice was warmer, though, as if inviting Endymion and the other princesses in on the joke.

Jupiter did not appear to be accepting the invitation, but at least sparks didn’t literally fly when she glowered at Zoisite. Or when she glowered at Mercury, a moment after; that one confused Endymion a little, but it didn’t seem to be the time to ask her what she was angry about. He crossed over to her side instead, and followed quick and quiet as she stalked through the short trip through quiet back halls to where _she_ was waiting.

The Princess of Mars barely had time to step out of the way.

Serenity wound her arms around him and laid her cheek against his chest, small and warm, overexcited and easing down at their contact and, as always, utterly perfect. He held her in turn, breathing the sweet, ethereal scent of her hair, and walked her gently a couple of steps forward to let Jupiter come in and close the door behind them.

Apparently they had two chaperones tonight. Endymion didn’t mind.

“I’m so sorry,” Serenity said, muffled. “I know how much he means to you—and it’s my fault, I was the one who wanted to look around without all the people, and I was the one who went off ahead of Jupiter, and I was the one he was protecting. I’m so sorry. I won’t—I won’t ever come down without telling you again. I knew we weren’t supposed to but I just thought, thought it wasn’t forbidden like _that_ , just something we weren’t supposed to do, something we’d get in trouble for and it would be okay, I didn’t know _that_ would happen. I’m so—”

“Serenity.” He said her name softly, like the caress and the privilege it was; she stilled under it the way she might have at a touch to her face. Taking it not as a demand to be quiet, but as an invitation, as a signal that she _could_ stop if she wanted to. And she did.

He couldn’t help it; he kissed one side of her forehead before he said anything else. “He’ll be all right. It might take him some time to heal, but Mercury says so, and everything I saw says so too. We just have to be a little more careful, that’s all.”

“I will,” Serenity promised, and somehow she made the promise sound reckless, and he couldn’t help the smile it brought from him, either. “I will. And I’ll make the girls be, too.”

He laughed. “I don’t think you need to _make_ them.”

“Well, I will anyway! And—and—is there anything else we can do?” She craned her neck, letting wider, brighter blue eyes seek his. “I know Mercury’s doing everything she can—but when he wakes up—”

He thought about that unease, that restlessness. “I think there might be. If you can try to make him feel comfortable—I’m not sure he knows where he is, but whatever he thinks is going on, it’s unsettling him.”

“Well, of course it is!” Serenity objected. “It _hurts_!”

“Mercury’s giving him something for the pain,” Endymion said. “I don’t know what, but I know that he’s not feeling any of it right now—or maybe that’s just part of how deeply unconscious he still was when I got there. Though you might be right, it might be awareness of the wound whether or not he can feel pain from it.”

“Oh! Oh, I didn’t think of that. She hardly ever gives me anything for pain, I forgot.”

“That’s because if you were balancing on a rail and fell off and scraped your knees,” Mars said, “and she gave you something to take the pain of the scrapes away, you’d just climb right back up on the railing and do it _again_.”

Serenity sniffed, without dignifying Mars with a glare. “Would not.”

“Did,” Jupiter said.

“More than once,” Mars added.

Endymion buried his smile in Serenity’s hair for a moment, which had the accidental side effect of muffling her noise of indignation a little. “That’s okay,” he said, muffled himself. “That’s why Kunzite didn’t let me take anything for a lot of my bruises, too.”

Serenity paused, and pushed back enough to look up at him with a sudden narrowing of her eyes. “Wait,” she said. “You can _heal_ your bruises.”

“That might have been another part of why,” Endymion admitted.

“So they never hurt at all!”

“Did so! When I got them.” He grinned at her. “Just not as long.”

She made a face at him, and he laughed. She didn’t wait for him to stop before she was talking again. “Anyway. How _can_ we make him more comfortable? What does he think is comfortable? What would settle his unsettled? Would he think _he_ shouldn’t be getting anything for the pain? I hope not, it must be awful, I wouldn’t even be able to _look_ at him. I already ran away once. And cried all over Venus. But Mercury’s not actually _fixing_ him anymore, is she? So that should be okay. He can just look pale and nobly weary and have us waiting on him hand and foot.”

“I am absolutely sure,” Endymion said, “that you and your girls waiting on him hand and foot would make Kunzite _very_ unsettled.”

“Oh.” Serenity considered that for a few seconds. “Well, we can’t get anyone _else_ to wait on him.”

“It’s the hand and foot part,” he explained. “Kunzite doesn’t like feeling dependent on anyone else. That he actually _is_ dependent on other people right now makes that worse. So if people are fussing over him, he’ll be trying to climb the walls to get away. And I’m pretty sure Mercury would say that climbing is off-limits for a while. So we’d better make sure he doesn’t feel like he has to, or we’ll have the best doctor on the Moon mad at us.”

“Oooh. So we need to take care of him without _looking_ like we’re taking care of him.” Serenity nestled closer, rewrapping one arm at his waist, slipping the other hand up between them so she could rest it on his shoulder.

“Do we have to take care of him in the first place?” Jupiter asked, sounding faintly despairing.

“Of _course_ we do,” Serenity said stoutly. “While he’s here, anyhow. He got hurt saving _me_ , you know!”

“If we keep the Earth Prince up here longer, can’t he make him heal faster? And get him out of our hair sooner?” Mars’ voice.

Jupiter sighed, and beat Serenity to it, probably by virtue of not stopping to gather her indignation first. “We are not solving our problems by resorting to kidnapping.”

“It’s not kidnapping! It’s just … if we have to have Earthers up here for days, can’t we get the ones that are _less_ obnoxious to be around?”

“I’m glad I rate less obnoxious,” Endymion confided to Serenity, lower-voiced. She giggled.

Endymion just hoped, very hard, that whoever was taking the shift on watch when Kunzite woke up, it wasn’t going to be Mars.

“You like him.”

Zoisite blinked up, startled. Those were the first words Mercury had said since they’d been left alone. “Endymion? Of course I do.”

“No.” Mercury adjusted a shining crystal—figuratively shining. Sparkling, not glowing from within. Not like some of the array before her. “Kunzite.”

It wasn’t so much that Zoisite remembered to be wary; that, he’d never forgotten. It was only that the wariness uncoiled within his chest and slithered down to wrap itself, cold and clinging, around several different internal organs. “Him too, of course. I wouldn’t work with him if I didn’t.”

Mercury had yet to look at him that he could tell. “Unless your prince told you to.”

“Then I would,” Zoisite acknowledged. “For however long I needed to.”

“That’s very loyal of you. I imagine he must be at least that loyal, too.”

Zoisite tamped down the urge to put himself between Mercury and the bed. It’d show far too much of his reactions, and it wouldn’t do any good in the process. “That’s three of-course answers in a row. Would you like to save time and just ask whatever it is you’re working around to, or do you feel obligated to go through all the intervening motions first?”

Jupiter would have had a little tantrum, again. Mercury wasn’t nearly so entertaining, which paradoxically made her reaction more interesting: she took the question at face value, and answered straightaway. “Why do you like Kunzite?”

It wasn’t the question he expected. Zoisite parried to buy a moment. “Why do you care?”

“Jupiter and Endymion talked about why Endymion cared about him.” Mercury made another tiny adjustment, tapping the crystal to turn it an almost imperceptible degree. “Jupiter didn’t understand, because Kunzite’s always been awful to her. But Endymion cares about him, because Kunzite is loyal to him, and possibly because Kunzite is almost as stubborn as Endymion is. Endymion responds to loyalty with loyalty. But your personality, and your reactions, are different from Endymion’s. The reasons that you like Kunzite are likely to be different reasons. I’d like to know what they are.”

“Because Kunzite’s always been awful to Jupiter? Or because Kunzite’s always been awful to you?”

Mercury lifted her head, and leveled a long look at him through her strange blue-tinged glasses. “Because you might not be here when he wakes up, and I’d like to know what to tell the others to look for so that none of them get _too_ tempted. Normally I’d say well, he’s on life support anyhow, but If Jupiter gets mad and hits him with lightning, it might damage my equipment too much to keep him going.”

Zoisite wrinkled his nose for a moment, then made himself stop; the last thing he needed was premature lines on his face. “And here I thought you people were supposed to be more civilized than we are. Above such petty things as bad tempers.”

He knew he’d misstepped when Mercury’s mouth curved into a surprisingly gentle smile: amused, not annoyed. “Yes, well. None of us have had to keep your prince from being stabbed yet.”

Zoisite spread his hands. “Even by Mars?” he asked, and then let his head tip down just enough to glance up through his eyelashes at her. A coquettish little hint of retreat. “But you were asking about Kunzite. I suppose—you could say that I like him because he lets me learn things from him. But that’s not quite right. If he’s better at something than the people around him, he _wants_ them to learn things from him. Not so that they know he’s better than they are. So that there’s a chance that they might become better than _he_ is; so that he has a chance of learning things from them, too.”

Mercury's gaze dropped from his, shifting off to one side. He watched her take that in, study it, compare it to what she already knew. Watched her look back up to him with a faintly puzzled little frown. “Are you suggesting that he’s awful to Jupiter so that she can learn to keep her emotions under better control?”

The blink was involuntary; that wasn’t a possibility Zoisite had considered. He hoped it didn’t show too much. “Well,” he said, with a lazily amused smile. “It would fit with his style, wouldn’t it? Not that I can say for certain. After all, it’s not as if they’re on the friendliest of terms. Maybe he’s just hoping for a better quality of opposition.”

Mercury watched him with a remarkable openness of expression. “I wonder what he thinks he might learn from her.”

Zoisite gave her a little shrug and a disarming smile. “Something shocking, I presume.”

It was a cheap joke, but her wince was gratifying. Would have been gratifying. If not for the faintly harsher breath from the bed beside him.

Zoisite pushed back against his instinct to turn, not completely, but enough to slow himself. Enough to let him see Mercury’s expression lose all emotion and turn intent, like Kunzite’s own sometimes did when he took up a problem. No anger, no spite, no anticipation. Perhaps her efforts really were genuine. Or perhaps she was simply professional about whatever else she’d begun doing to him.

Something he’d concern himself with later. Because he’d also slowed himself enough that by the time he could see Kunzite’s eyes, they were open. Focused, if with an effort. Scanning what he could see of the room without turning his head.

“Should I even ask how long you’ve been awake?” Zoisite lowered a hand, setting fingers crosswise over Kunzite’s larger ones.

Kunzite’s lips moved, but the sound that emerged from his throat wasn’t a word, and a moment later his teeth were bared in irritation. Zoisite glanced back at Mercury, and translated the expression if not the noise. “Water?”

“Maybe.” Mercury lifted her hands, directing something unseen with her gestures; lights flickered and changed in her transparent visor. “I think—yes.” She emerged from her corner at last, with a cup cradled in her hands: clear with a trace of cloud, but more than clear enough to show that the water within it was clear as well. Zoisite half-noted its embellishments, silver curves connecting stylized flowers with five sapphire-blue petals apiece. Something of Mercury’s own, then. Probably not poisoned in itself.

Not that she couldn’t have been feeding Kunzite poisons and drugs aplenty. Endymion didn’t spot them; but if Kunzite weren’t healing the way he should have been…

Zoisite pushed that thought firmly in the direction of later, and greeted Mercury with another smile as he took the cup in his hands. Stone, not glass; rock crystal. He ran a thumb over the curve, admiring for an instant, then relegated it to the utilitarian realm rather than the aesthetic.

Kunzite let Zoisite hold the thing for him for all of two sips before he tried to sit up.

“None of that,” Zoisite said sharply. “You’re literally being held together by pins right now. Be gentle on yourself.”

Kunzite took a moment of care to shape each syllable. “Then give me a hand.”

“I am. Two.”

Gray eyes narrowed at Zoisite, and finally Zoisite felt himself relax. The right flavor of irritation, familiar and perfect. If Mercury _had_ started anything, it hadn’t gotten to the point of affecting Kunzite’s mind yet, or at least not the core of his personality. He breathed out, then set the cup down and fussed with pillows, trying to rearrange them and support Kunzite simultaneously. After a couple of moments of watching, Mercury came over to provide some quiet assistance, and the entire project suddenly proceeded much more quickly. Two hands, it seemed, weren’t always quite enough.

Once Kunzite was propped up a little, the water drinking also happened more quickly. Something about the decreased risk of trying to breathe it, Zoisite presumed. Mercury reclaimed the cup as it emptied. “In a little while,” she said, “if everything goes well, you can have some broth. Your prince helped you enough that I’m almost certain that there won’t be any problems, but I want to make sure that there aren’t any sudden shocks to your system. Nothing really hot, nothing really cold, and we’ll need to ease you in to eating again carefully. I won’t be able to tell you over how long until we see how your body reacts to the liquids.”

Zoisite watched Kunzite breathe out, slowly; in, very carefully; out again, this time formed into words. No vague noises this time. Carefully formed consonants, slowly paced syllables, pauses for breathing placed with awareness if not intent. Eyes hazed a little, their focus slow, but alert enough to be wary. “With all respect, Your Highness. Why does the Princess of Mercury—have any say over my care?”

“That,” Zoisite sighed, “is a story you are not going to want to hear.”

Kunzite’s blink was extended long enough that it might have covered a particularly brief prayer, if Kunzite had been the kind of man given to praying at all. “Things I don’t want,” he said. “Story of my year.”


	10. "Your Highness."

“Your Highnesses,” Jupiter said reluctantly. “It’s time.” And to the young man who held her princess as if, quite correctly, she were the most precious thing in existence, the heart of his life and the vital spark of his spirit: “We need to pick up Zoisite—or rescue Mercury from him—and get you both home before your morning starts.” Not ‘in time to get sleep.’ He’d sacrificed that entirely by now. Given how little he must have gotten their night before, she’d be surprised if he was still on his feet by the end of the day.

“Already?” Serenity mourned, but she stretched up on tiptoes to press a kiss against Endymion’s cheek, then nestled in with her head against his chest for a breathless moment before sighing and taking a tiny step back.

He let go of her almost as reluctantly, one hand trailing down her arm in a parting caress. “Tomorrow night,” he told Serenity. “The more often I’m here, the faster we can get Kunzite out of Mercury’s care, and the safer you’ll be from discovery. And if I’m here anyhow … there’s no reason not to see each other.”

“Tomorrow night you ought to be sleeping.” Jupiter folded her arms sternly. It was, alas, not as effective on Endymion as on her princess. “You won’t do anyone any good if you drive yourself into hallucinations from exhaustion.”

“I’m used to it,” Endymion said, breezily confident.

Jupiter lifted her eyebrows pointedly. “To hallucinations? I thought you said Earth was supposed to be _past_ the point of being ruled by someone-or-other’s random visions.”

Mars glared at her. It took Jupiter a blank instant to figure out why; she lifted both hands hastily and took a quick physical step back, but Endymion’s laugh came before she had the chance to think of anything to say. Or even to stutter. “All right,” he said. “I’ll nap, mighty Mother of Storms. I promise. There probably won’t be anything more urgent in the afternoon than a hunting trip, and we’re due a storm of our own; when it’s rained out I’ll beg off and claim studying, and sleep instead. Will that satisfy you?”

Jupiter snuck Mars another apologetic look, then said more firmly to the prince, “No, but it’s a start. And speaking of starting—”

“Oh, yes,” Mars muttered. “That’s it. Run away. I’ll catch up with _you_ later.”

Endymion made his smile vanish before starting for the door. Serenity did not. Jupiter ignored the giggles following them with all her might, and changed the subject the moment the door was closed behind them. “There’s a question I wanted to ask you before you left.”

“This seems as good a time as any,” Endymion answered. “At least if it’s not a state secret.”

“I don’t think it is, no.” Jupiter considered for a couple of paces. It was a little odd, not needing to slow her pace to accommodate shorter legs. That was the advantage of walking alongside Endymion or Nephrite, though. They could keep up with her. At a walk, anyhow. Someday she’d race one of them and find out whether their height really was an advantage. Not the other one, though. Not him. “There was something I heard on your planet. That you’d seen people get sick, from drinking from a new kind of glass. Is that true?”

“The new crystal,” Endymion said at once. “Flint glass, they call it, but the important part is that it’s made with lead. They say that it’s harmless, that the lead is incorporated into the glass, and that the old reports of lead sickness all talk about pallor as the primary symptom. But there’s more than that, subtler problems, and I can see them in people at court. People forget things more often. They’re tired; they get aggressive. And I can see the poison in their bodies, attacking their nerves and their organs and their blood. But I can’t prove that it’s there.”

Jupiter blinked. “You know about lead poisoning? I mean, lead sickness?”

Endymion gave her a puzzled look. “Of course,” he said. “It was a very long time ago, but we have records of people who recorded the sickness in leadworkers, and then traced symptoms in the rest of the population. One of my ancestors outlawed making any number of things out of lead, wine vats and water pipes and anything to cook with. My family tells the story as a joke and a warning; it was one of the least popular laws we can remember, not because lead was cheaper and easier to work, though it was, not because it was expensive to replace everything, though it was, but because it made the wine taste sweeter, and people got _really_ upset about the difference. Not just when it was first passed; there’s been more than one time that a country or a province balked at joining with us because they didn’t want to give up what they thought were the _good_ drinks. Even if it might save them a lot of suffering in the long run.”

“I had no idea.”

“That we figured it out? Or that we managed to remember it once we did?” Endymion’s teasing tone brought heat up in Jupiter’s cheeks; she kept her eyes firmly on Mercury’s door, now that they were approaching it. “It’s not that surprising,” he continued. “We do tell stories. Though it’d help,” and she could’ve bet that the little pause marked him glancing aside at her, “if we could figure out more of these things to be able to pass stories on about. We’ve never been able to work out how to keep wounds from going bad, not reliably. There are a few plant extracts that help, or poultices—snow-in-summer leaves, some cedars, honey—but we don’t know why they help, or why they fail. And I don’t know why the wounds that I heal _don’t_ go bad. Only that they don’t—and that it’s much, much harder to heal ones that already have.”

He didn’t ask. That was the worst part of it, she thought. If he’d asked, she could have said no, she could have said that while Serenity could choose to do forbidden things she would not, she could have said that Serenity-the-Queen had marked a line between the Moon and the Earth for the Earth’s own sake and she would not cross it more than she had to. But he didn’t ask.

And the empty space that left, where she could have volunteered—

She thought about the filthy and contaminated streets of the city she and her princess had so recently walked. About the creatures running loose. About the chickens. About the realization that they simply didn’t _know_ that there was worse happening there than the smell.

And now she knew that they were trying their best anyhow, that it wasn’t just neglect and lack of caring; and just a few words from her would bridge the gap. Would be enough to make them understand.

Would make all the difference in their world.

Jupiter quickened her steps, and pulled the door open, aching to get two of the three intruders back to their home so that she could talk with Mercury in private, while Kunzite was still—

—almost—sitting up—in bed.

The startled touch of Endymion’s hand against her shoulder as he came up short behind her was her first clue that she’d stopped dead in the doorway.

“What is it?” he asked, and then answered himself, after a fashion. “ _Oh._ ” Gently, he nudged at Jupiter’s shoulder again. She stepped out of the way, feeling particularly ungainly and awkward. His cape brushed her arm as he passed her, moving in a restrained rush to the side of the bed, to settle on one knee and lay his hand on Kunzite’s arm.

“Highness.” Kunzite’s voice was almost inaudible at her distance.

“Hush,” Endymion answered. “Everything’s going to be fine. We’re out of time, we can’t stay—but we’ll be back as soon as we can.”

Kunzite did something that must have been intended as an intimidating narrowing of his eyes. It came across a little more like the kind of exhaustion Endymion _should_ have been showing, something making eyelids droop and threatening unconsciousness at any moment, possibly mid-word. “We will not,” he said, and his voice, like the expression, was not _meant_ to be weak. “We’ll be going home. That’s all.”

Endymion bent his head over Kunzite’s hand with a sigh. “We, as in Zoisite and I, will be going home. For now. And back in less than a day, the moment the senshi will let us. You, as in the overly-brave idiot I am very grateful to right now, will be staying right here. I can’t be with you all the time, and Mercury’s machines are the only other things that can make sure nothing goes wrong with the things she did to save you. You need them. So you’re staying. As soon as either she says or I believe you’re clear, you’re coming home. But not until then.”

Kunzite closed his eyes the rest of the way, and his breath did something that rasped faintly. A sigh? Jupiter hoped it was a sigh. She couldn’t think of any other alternatives that weren’t distressing. “I am not,” he said, taking pains to enunciate clearly, “staying on the Moon.”

“I told you he’d say that,” Zoisite murmured to no-one in particular.

“You are staying wherever you need to so that your gut doesn’t decide to run backwards, choke you to death on your own food, and possibly rip itself open inside your body just to give you a worse time while the choking is happening.” Endymion pressed Kunzite’s arm lightly. “You can take that as an order if you have to.”

Kunzite’s eyebrows lifted. “That was unnecessarily colorful.” The polysyllables made him slow down and take still more care, but he managed them without stuttering or getting lost. “At least tell our hostess not to drug me.”

Endymion turned his head toward Mercury’s corner. “Kunzite has decided that he hates sleep, rest, and not feeling constantly even sicker than he is,” he said. “It’ll make him an even worse patient. Are you willing to put up with that?”

“No,” said Mercury, her tone incongruously bright. “But it’s all right. If he gets too worked up, he’ll probably exhaust himself and fall unconscious for a while no matter how much he hates sleep.”

Zoisite heaved a deep sigh, with a roll of his shoulders that suggested a nonexistent roll of his eyes. “That’s a _wonderful_ bright side. Tell me, can you bottle that?”

“That’s a good idea,” Endymion said to Zoisite. And then to Mercury: “If he gets to be too much to handle, you have my official permission to put him to sleep yourself, if you have medicines to do it safely.”

Mercury glanced up and blinked at him through her visor. “Which one? My patient, or Zoisite?”

Jupiter’s choked laugh and Zoisite’s indignant objection were both half drowned out by Endymion and Kunzite answering almost in chorus. Mostly Endymion; Kunzite’s voice was weaker and slower than usual. “Yes.”

Crossed arms and a glare made up Zoisite’s further response. “That’s it,” he said, with a sniff and a tilt upward of his nose. “We’re going home now.” He didn’t actually make any move to rise.

“Yes,” Jupiter said. “Yes, you are. I don’t want to bring you two back into a room stuffed full of guards trying to figure out where their prince went in the middle of the night. Come on, you’re out of time.” She held out hands toward Zoisite and Endymion, tapping a foot like an impatient Venus. Endymion sighed and let go of Kunzite’s hand, then straightened up and turned toward Jupiter. Both his hands fell to his sides as he did; the turn meant that one of them brushed Kunzite’s again.

Jupiter was almost certain that no-one else in the room could see his expression in that moment: eyes widening, head twitching upward, as if he’d started from a static shock. Except, of course, that _she_ hadn’t been playing pranks. And if he’d been accumulating any kind of charge from anything else, she’d have seen it.

She wanted very badly to know what the cause of it was. But asking right now … there wasn’t time. And if she came across as accusatory, Mercury would step in. If it were something that really mattered, too, Mercury would have seen it, and stopped everything; and she wasn’t doing that.

Kunzite, of course, showed no reaction. And no new sympathy for Earth’s struggling peoples, not even gratitude for the wound he’d taken in Princess Serenity’s defense, was going to make her stop wanting to punch him in the face.

She took a deep breath, and thought about having two less Earth people hidden on the Moon, and that was enough for her to bring a smile; and a moment later Endymion was taking _her_ hand (and she had never been more grateful for her gloves), and Zoisite following grudgingly with a last glance over his shoulder at the patient. “We’ll be back,” Endymion said for him, again, unnecessarily. “Soon. Don’t worry, Kunzite.”

And then Jupiter tapped the device Mercury had designed that made their teleportation more efficient, that let them make brief preprogrammed trips from the Moon to Earth and back again without the entire circle of four present, and in a flare of light and magic and ozone the lab dissolved around them, to be replaced by Endymion’s private chamber in the surface fort that he and his men preferred this year.

It was supposed to be empty.

The presence of Nephrite, instead, made her smile momentarily real. His expression softened a little as he caught sight of her, too; but that didn’t banish what his expression had been the minute before. She let go of Zoisite and Endymion’s hands, and considered holding hers out to him—but Zoisite was right there. She didn’t particularly care for the mockery it would invite; there’d been enough of that tonight already.

Nephrite settled the question for her, brushing past Zoisite and coming to lay hands lightly on her upper arms. “You can’t stay,” he said, and he knew better than to make it a question, but his voice was wistful all the same.

“I need to go before people start wanting to dress your prince up like one of those dolls you talked about the dressmakers using,” Jupiter agreed.

Nephrite snorted, less than elegant. “You were with him the whole time?”

She lifted a hand and patted at the inside of his arm. “Safe and sound,” she promised. “I hardly took my eyes off of him.”

“Good.”

“I’m glad to learn you’re so concerned about my safety,” Zoisite nearly sang. “You’re adored by us all for the best of reasons, Nephrite.”

“Zoisite!” Endymion gave him yet another scandalized look across the pair. Zoisite brightened, straightening up like a flower touched by sunshine.

“And now,” Jupiter sighed up to Nephrite, “I’d better leave even faster. Your friends are noisy.”

Nephrite smiled down at her. She saw the strain around the edges. That wasn’t something she could ask about in front of Zoisite, either. “Good luck,” he said quietly, and let her go.

It was only in the last instant before the magic flared again that she actually noticed Jadeite, waiting silently in the wings. Whatever he was waiting for, it hadn’t been to hit her over the head, at least. But even back in the safety of Mercury’s lab, the last thing she could think of about the whole situation was calm.

Jadeite exhaled as Jupiter disappeared. “Endymion,” he said. “Zoisite. Please. I can explain why we’re here, and why I’m asking this, in a minute. But please, we need one thing from you both first. We need to know every person you saw while you were on the Moon, and how long you saw them for.”

Zoisite glanced sidelong at Endymion, his eyebrows twitching up, then studied Nephrite. “Princess Jupiter took us straight into a room with Kunzite and Princess Mercury,” he said. “I stayed there the whole time. So did Mercury.”

“So did Kunzite,” Endymion added, mostly unnecessarily. “Jupiter stayed with me. I left for a while, close to when we came back, to see Serenity. Mars was with her. From the way the two of them were talking, it sounded like they’d been keeping each other company for a while.”

Nephrite stopped looking at the spot where Jupiter had been, and frowned. “Neither of you saw Venus.”

“I didn’t so much as hear her mentioned,” Zoisite noted, voice soft and lazy.

“Serenity talked about her a little,” Endymion said slowly. “But I have the impression that was something that happened earlier. Not tonight. Why are you trying to figure out where all of the Senshi were?”

Jadeite pulled himself up as if he were trying to match Endymion’s or Nephrite’s height. He didn’t have a chance at it, but he tried all the same, with a little tug at his jacket as if he thought straightening it would help. “Your Highness,” he said, and the switch from name to title brought Endymion’s attention to him faster than anything else would have. “We’ve confirmed one death; the others are only probable at this point, we have people working on getting in to find out. But it seems that the prisoners from the attack on the visiting princess were murdered in their cells tonight. By magic. By _silver_ magic.”

Endymion went very still. The room fell sickeningly quiet.

“No,” their prince said at last. “It wasn’t the Senshi. I don’t believe that.”

“Whether it was the Senshi or not,” Nephrite said, quiet and heavy, “it was the Moon.”

“That’s not proved.”

“Silver magic, Endymion. You don’t want to hear about it from us? Fine. But we can drag in the damn barrier on the cell door and _show_ you. It hasn’t faded yet.”

Endymion’s jaw tightened; he shook his head. “A color doesn’t mean anything.”

“Who else knows how to make a spell that’ll keep _axes_ from going through a door?” Jadeite asked. “For hours? That’ll last when the person who cast it is gone? Without so much as chalk marks in the room they were casting it from?”

“That we can’t _name_ somebody doesn’t mean that someone doesn’t exist!” Endymion insisted. “It wasn’t the Moon. They don’t _do_ this kind of thing!”

“You don’t _want_ them to be doing this kind of thing,” Nephrite growled.

“Endymion,” Jadeite said, more softly, “nobody but us and the Senshi knew you were gone. How did whoever did this know _when_ to do it? When you wouldn’t be close enough to feel that kind of magic flare up?”

Zoisite shifted, pulling at a lock of his hair, and gave a quiet look sideways to Endymion. “When Kunzite wouldn’t be here,” he said quietly, “to be able to tell us what the energy really was.”

Endymion’s hands closed into fists; but he looked down at them, and deliberately opened them again, uncurling finger by finger. “Fine,” he said. “I want to see this magic for myself. And the bodies. Arrange it. Make room in my schedule. Not out of sleep. I’m going back tonight.”

“That,” Nephrite snarled, “is a fucking _stupid_ idea, _Your Highness._ Just because you don’t _think_ it was the Moon doesn’t mean they’re not the first thirty suspects in line.”

Endymion looked up at him, sharp. “You don’t think it was Jupiter,” he said.

Nephrite recoiled a step. Endymion continued, quietly, “Zoisite— _you_ don’t think it was Mercury.”

Zoisite didn’t flinch. Didn’t drop his eyes. Didn’t look away.

Endymion’s expression shifted by tiny increments toward the horrified. “You— _do_ think it was Mercury? Zoi, you were _in the room_ with her.”

“I don’t think she did it herself,” Zoisite said softly. “I do think she was hiding something. The whole time we were there.”

“Hiding something? Hiding _what_?” Endymion must have caught the stricken look that his exasperated tone put on Zoisite’s face; he turned back to Nephrite and Jadeite again. “And you two. Who put this idea in your heads? Who came up with this idea that it was the Moon? I want to talk with the guards who were on duty, too. I want them quarantined for the duration—politely. But we don’t need this getting out—”

“Jadeite took care of that.” Nephrite wasn’t snarling anymore. He sounded calm, now, assertive, a little curt. That was never a good sign. It didn’t mean his temper was running any less high. It just meant that his temper was _planning_ its mad.

Jadeite lifted his hands to pull focus off of Nephrite before any more of that planning could happen. “The guards are getting extra pay to stay on-site, and we’ve shifted people around so they’re not in contact with any of the others. It’ll leave the place a little short-handed till they’re back on rotation, so we’ll need to take care of things fast. Apparently whatever happened was pretty loud, though, so rumors are going to start happening even faster no matter what we do. As for who we got the idea from—”

“The answer is nobody.” Nephrite was not cooperating with Jadeite’s ‘take the focus off of him’ plan. Jadeite sighed internally. Nephrite kept talking. “Jadeite also figured you were going to start yelling at us about _that_ again. Like you do. So we were careful. We didn’t talk with anyone about it at the prison; we gave orders and left. We came straight here. The only words we traded with the guards were enough to get us in here without them following. They didn’t ask why. We didn’t tell them.”

An angry Nephrite, Jadeite reflected, was a very good way to keep people from asking questions. If an angry Nephrite weren’t also volatile and liable to explode in a random direction at any moment, it might be worth keeping one around more of the time. Right now—

Right now he wasn’t interrupting this particular angry Nephrite. Trying to manage Endymion was one thing. But it would be a lot harder if he were freshly minus a couple of teeth.

Endymion closed his eyes again. Breathed, slowly. Then said, quietly, “I’m sorry for jumping to conclusions.”

Jadeite blinked, then glanced over at Zoisite and Nephrite to see whether they’d heard the same thing he had. The two of them were simultaneously glancing at each other, making the identical check.

“Thank you for being careful,” Endymion continued. “And for thinking ahead. You’re right. I’m tired. I’m not thinking straight. I’m going to have to be careful about that, today. So I’m going to ask you two to go ahead and do that schedule management, and then get what rest you can. You, too, Zoisite, as soon as you’ve got a reasonable excuse to leave officially. We’ve all had long nights, and we’re going to have more of them. And we don’t need to be jumping down each other’s throats the whole time. Even if we disagree.” He opened his eyes again, and held out his hands to Nephrite. “I’m sorry.”

Nephrite stared down at the offered hands. Then said, “So am I.” And turned for the door.

Jadeite slid a hand into one of Endymion’s in his wake, and squeezed it. “Me, too. Think we yelled loud enough the whole wing heard us? If they think we were arguing all night, maybe we can all get away with sleeping through the day.”

Zoisite touched Endymion’s other hand, courtly and graceful again. “I’m sorry for making you angry.” His smile fluttered for a moment. Jadeite braced for the inevitable.

It didn’t come till they were almost out the door themselves; Zoisite looked back over his shoulder and added, like his normal impish self, “Your Highness.”

The cushion Endymion threw hit the wall, not either of them.


	11. "You were right."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that this chapter includes an illustration. Please note the "Body Horror" tag.

“Fire is…” Venus squinted at the ceiling, which was not actually doing its part in helping her think through the problem. She blamed it. Personally. “Fire is what, exactly?”

Artemis twitched his tail irritably, his attention more on the console and its displays than on Venus. “The guiding principle of the planet Mars,” he said.

“Yes, but that’s the _easy_ part. What else is it?”

He hunched his shoulders crankily, somehow without accidentally hitting any controls. “Magically? It works with passion, with the drive to act, to move, to do. Physically, it’s a chemical reaction involving supplying sufficient energy to start a substance combining with oxygen, or sometimes other chemicals. That puts out excess energy in the form of heat and light, sometimes enough of it to make the reaction self-sustaining.”

Venus paused. “How can you say ‘excess’ and ‘self-sustaining’ when your teeth are all pointy?”

“I’m a cat. We invented hissing.”

She glared at the back of his head, which mostly gave her a still better view of his tail flicking impatiently from side to side. The idea that he could make the view worse occurred to her; she went back to staring at the unhelpful ceiling. “Maybe something’s going to use up all the oxygen in the solar system.”

“It’s possible to create a fire that doesn’t use oxygen,” Artemis said. “You wouldn’t want to be anywhere near it, but it’s possible.”

“How near is near?”

“A couple of miles would be a good start. I don’t like fires that burn sand.”

“Isn’t that how you make glass?”

“That’s melting sand. Burning sand is worse.”

“So you keep a lot of water around?”

“... if you want the burning sand to explode and throw itself at you while now on extra fire, sure.”

Venus frowned at the air. Not at the ceiling. The ceiling did not deserve a frown. “You’re making this up.”

“You can ask Mercury. Especially if it means you stop asking me, I’m busy.”

“Your idea of busy usually involves a nap. So if it’s not all the oxygen in the solar system going away, what is it? Something sucking all the emotional drive out of everybody? Or absorbing all the free energy in the solar system? How could something even _do_ that?”

“If we knew, we wouldn’t have a _problem,_ ” Artemis grumbled. “Do you _want_ to ask Mercury? She just started putting in questions about Earth, she’s probably not too busy right now.”

Bothering Mercury was definitely more interesting than the architecture. Venus swung her feet down from the chair she’d propped them on, sat up, and pulled her skirts over her knees. “I want to ask her a lot of things. Let’s see if she’ll open a line.”

Artemis pawed at the console, and a moment later a display manifested with a simplified cartoon of Mercury. Not real-time communication; definitely not. But not her full attention, either.

“Hello,” the cartoon said. “This is a simulation. The real Princess of Mercury is currently occupied with—” Wide blue eyes blinked, and it read out with less expression, “‘My patient waking up every time there is sound.’ She will check in on the conversation regularly and provide information where queries exceed what I have been programmed with. She wishes to assure you that this communication is secure on her end,” another blink, “and in transmission.”

Venus stared at the hologram. “That,” she said, “is the creepiest thing I’ve seen this week.”

The cartoon manifested dimples. “The Princess of Mercury has prerecorded a response to your statement. She says, ‘Thank you.’”

“Artemis, will you shed on her sheets for me?”

The cat coughed. “Definitely not. Especially when she’s listening to us talk, and besides, she probably knows everyone who comes within fifteen feet of her or Princess Serenity’s door anyhow.”

“Drat.” Venus shifted her weight, leaning onto one hand. “Okay. How _is_ Mercury’s patient?”

A third blink; that must be the way that Mercury had arranged for the hologram to cover referring back. “Annoying. But improving. He has apologized for his behavior and agreed to be more polite. His healing isn’t progressing the way it should, even with the addition of his prince’s magic. He claims not to know why; he suggested poison or enchantment as possible reasons. Also, Jupiter says that the behavior of the rest of the Earth Prince’s men makes her think something happened up there while the medical delegation was down here. I’m searching for anomalous energies, but Earth’s ambient magic is still uncontrolled and often malicious. It could take some time to tell whether anything significant happened recently.”

“Everything takes time. Time should take care of itself for a little while so we can get _on_ with things.” Venus aimed a frown somewhere above the hologram’s head. It was cute, she had to admit. But Mercury usually was, if she wasn’t angry; and it took a lot to get her angry. “Couldn’t it be a political thing they’re worried about, too? This is a whole political mess on their end. Does sand really burn? Is it possible for something to suck up all the free energy in the solar system? Or all the emotional drive? Can’t you put your patient to sleep and come out and talk?”

“In order,” the hologram answered, unperturbed, “yes, it does, yes, that’s true, yes but only under very specific conditions, I don’t know, I don’t know, and his prince giving me permission to put him to sleep if he was uncooperative implies that I will get more cooperation out of him if I don’t put him to sleep for other reasons.”

Venus started to ask about the specific conditions, then decided she didn’t really want to know. “Who cares about his cooperation? What’s he going to do, lie there _more_ antagonistically? You should put him to sleep because it’s funny.”

The hologram blinked at her. Then did it again, more slowly.

“Maybe he woke up,” Venus said aside to Artemis, lower-voiced.

“Maybe he heard you,” Artemis suggested.

“Maybe we can have you take over watching him for one of Mercury’s sleep shifts.”

“Yes. Yes, let’s do that.”

“Did you miss the ‘he saved the princess’ part? You don’t get to claw his eyes out.”

“I wouldn’t claw his eyes out!” Artemis actually turned around, sitting upright and coiling his tail behind him, to look indignant at Venus. “Eyes don’t have enough arteries.”

The hologram’s voice interrupted, sweet and bright as Mercury’s always was. “You should pay him a visit.”

“See?” Artemis demanded. “She agrees with me!”

“Venus should pay him a visit,” the hologram amended. Artemis gave it a disgruntled glare.

“I am not paying him a visit.” Venus tapped her thigh with the flat of her hand to emphasize the _not_. “Not until I understand exactly what’s going on. Which is _why_ I want to talk with the real Mercury. The situation up Earthside is starting to get out of control. If I’m going to deal with it, I need to know everything that happened up there.”

“Nobody knows everything that happened up there.” The cartoon of Mercury somehow managed to look apologetic. That wasn’t all that surprising, Venus had to admit; it was of Mercury, after all. “Zoisite’s invisibility prevented my being aware of all of his actions; I can extrapolate where he was at certain points, since he took part in the fight while invisible, but not the rest of the time. Also, at a certain point I turned my back on the end of the fight. Jupiter was distracted by the fight itself. And all of the Earthborn involved were affected by my fog.”

“But that’s not all of the witnesses.” Venus smoothed her skirt over her knee again, and let herself start a slow, smug grin. “And _I’m_ the one who took care of Serenity after she ran out of your lab. So if we put together what you saw with what she cried on _me_ about seeing—”

The hologram blinked once more. “The Princess of Mercury says: ‘Can you give me twenty minutes?’”

Nothing made sense. Nothing. Endymion had a faint hope that sleep might make sense out of some of it, but he was pretty sure he was fooling himself on that front. On two fronts, actually; he wasn’t sure he was going to get any sleep, either.

He sighed, turned over, draped an arm across his eyes to block the diffuse sunlight, and thought. The Moon had no reason to attack their prisoners, to begin with. Even if they’d been involved in an attack on their princess—they were _prisoners_. They weren’t a threat where they were, and they weren’t going anywhere else without the say-so of the justice system or the royal family. Neither of which were inclined to let them have another try. So for all the vengeance the Moon might want to have, or, more accurately, all the vengeance that the princesses of the _other_ planets might want to have, there was no practical reason for them to act now.

And yet his Shitennou were right. The magic that’d been used looked like lunar magic. Except that Endymion had never in his life come across a confirmed report of lunar magic being used like that.

A couple of years ago, that wouldn’t have been saying much. But since the people he was closest to on this world had started arguing with him about the subject, he’d started spending what spare time he had in the library, researching. There were stories that came up; there always were. But some of them were impossible; supposed incidents that left no witnesses, yet somehow had detailed accounts, or tales of terrible things happening that somehow left no records in the annals, and more to the point, no decrease in value in the tax records, and no requests for relief.

(The lack of requests for relief was more convincing to him than the other two, honestly.)

There were other reports that seemed to have corroboration; but when he traced down their sources, he found that a few links down the chain, _those_ works were all drawing on the same initial story. And on more than one occasion, story was absolutely the right word. People had taken fiction, claimed it as fact, and then cited each other back and forth. He was starting to wonder how anyone ever knew anything for certain.

The important thing was that all the stories that seemed likely to be actual history in some sense, rather than the work of overexcited imaginations, showed the Moon’s magic as something that touched Earth rarely if ever, and never showed it as an attack.

Kunzite would probably have had something acerbic and pessimistic to say about his taking that for granted. Definitely about his trusting his conclusions from books over the actual evidence on hand.

And there was the other problem. Kunzite. When he’d gone up to the moon, Endymion had been sure he knew how to handle Kunzite; get him healed and get him home, and everything else would work out, somehow. But he’d caught Kunzite in an unguarded moment. He’d _touched_ Kunzite in an unguarded moment.

He knew Kunzite kept secrets from him. That was all right. Everyone needed secrets; everyone needed things they could keep private, to themselves. Working with Endymion made that hard, but he tried his best not to intrude.

What he hadn’t known was that Kunzite was keeping something _that important_ from him.

And now—now Endymion wasn’t sure what to do at all.

Mercury was almost certain that the only reason Venus was actually using a chair was that she’d set up her display on a tabletop. Artemis, of course, was using a chair in the sense that his back paws were planted in Venus’s lap while he stretched up to bat at the little holographic figures that sketched out the fight on Earth.

“So nine attackers, total. Not organized, just with what they had to hand. A little spur-of-the-moment mob.”

Mercury nodded, her hair sweeping gently forward over a little of her cheeks. “I can’t guarantee that Zoisite _didn’t_ set them off,” she said. “But it doesn’t seem likely. Kunzite followed Jupiter in from back here. If Zoisite was with him, he most likely split off to keep watch over Serenity and me. And when he did involve himself—” She shifted the time of the display, to the point at which Jupiter threw her first lightning, and one of their assailants a little distance away staggered and fell into the way of another.

“Right. If he pushed that guy in _that_ direction—then he wasn’t with them; he was over _here_ , trailing you and Serenity when you went ahead, keeping you in sight but staying back far enough to back Kunzite up if he made Jupiter mad enough. And he was probably going to make Jupiter mad enough. Then you two ran back the way you’d come when things started going bad—”

“And he stayed off to the side, bracketing us,” Mercury agreed. “It’s a much more plausible reconstruction. Besides, when Kunzite followed Jupiter in, he set himself to hold off the enemy, not to join them. Which is interesting, given his political views.”

“But completely predictable,” Venus said absently. “It’s exactly the sort of thing he’d do. Can you show me how he got stabbed again?”

“Not in detail,” Mercury admitted. “I was watching Serenity. But most likely—” She increased the fog effects, simulating what the Earthmen would have been able to see. Which wasn’t much. The little figure of Kunzite oriented on sound, but had no way to guess how that sound was changed by the magic around him; the change in delay let the other man blunder into him almost knife-first, deflecting his sword for the necessary instant by sheer chance. “It was my fault as much as anything else. It didn’t occur to me to adjust the spell for the two of them.”

Venus made a face at her. “You were running away from a surprise mob, trying to watch the princess, not sure where your backup was, outnumbered, and not actually told anybody else was there. I’m pretty happy putting all the blame on the people trying to kill you.”

Mercury, as could be expected, ducked any response. “Why do you say what he did was predictable?”

Venus glanced back at the display, studying it frozen in its end-state: Kunzite sinking to one knee, Mercury scrambling to get her hands on him, to draw her magic down into him before he could bleed too badly. “Because it was. He doesn’t like the power differential between Earth and the Moon. But letting Serenity get hurt wouldn’t fix that; we’d just be more powerful than Earth _and_ mad at them. And Endymion would be upset. Letting Serenity get killed would be even worse. Killing Serenity himself—yes, I know you were thinking about it, stop looking at me like that—he’d _never_ do that.”

“Even if he thought his whole planet were in the balance?” Mercury asked quietly. “He’s suggested he thinks that, before.”

“Not unless it was down to the last second. The same way Mars might mutter about Endymion, but she wouldn’t just go take him out to solve the problem. Serenity loves him too much, and she couldn’t bear to hurt Serenity like that. Endymion loves _Serenity_ too much, and Kunzite couldn’t bear to hurt _Endymion_ like that.”

“It sounds like there are more than a few parallels,” Mercury said tentatively. “But how can you be sure?”

“We talk about more than dancing lessons.” Venus flashed her a quick, bright smile. “Could you roll that thing back to the beginning? I want to look at something.”

Obligingly, Mercury shifted the hologram with a flicker of light. Venus surveyed it, and frowned. “And back to the end again?”

Flicker.

“Back to the beginning?”

Flicker.

“Back to the end?”

Flicker.

“Will you _stop_ that?” complained Artemis. “You’re making my _eyes_ hurt, let alone my head.”

“I’ll stop finding things out if you really want to, and you can do it all yourself,” Venus said. “Mercury, when you’ve been reviewing this—you were focusing on the Prince’s men, weren’t you? Zoisite and Kunzite?”

Mercury gave a little nod. “They seemed to be the important thing.”

“So you weren’t looking at the rest of the Earthers.” Venus pointed at the display, from one little fallen figure to another. “There’s Kunzite’s jerk—as opposed to the jerk that _is_ Kunzite—and the one that Jupiter punched into a wall, that’s two. That bunch she lightninged, three-four-five, and the first one she lightninged, six—”

Mercury’s breath drew in.

“—and the guy that Zoisite pushed over, seven, and the guy with the axe that, uh,” Venus skipped the details of that unfortunate interaction, “that Zoisite threw the knife at. Eight.”

“But there were nine at the beginning,” Mercury said quietly.

“Uh-huh. Somehow, while you and Jupiter weren’t looking, one of them managed to get away.”

Artemis scowled at the display. “Think it’ll be a problem?”

Venus shrugged. “Not for us. But depending on how weird things are getting on Earth right now, you might not want to count on Endymion showing up to do healy-magic tonight.”

Endymion sat by Kunzite’s bedside, his hands folded tightly in his lap. He kept thinking he could see blood staining the white sheets, staining the white everything, but only in the corner of his eye; when he glanced over, though, there was nothing. Mercury would never let someone bleed in her laboratory, anyhow. Not any more than Nephrite would take Zoisite into somewhere he recorded his observations, and hand him a pen.

He shifted his weight, and his stool rocked beneath him a little, one of the legs tapping against the floor. Kunzite’s eyelids flickered for a moment before opening properly; he looked sidewise at Endymion without turning his head..

Endymion took a breath, quelled the urge to reach for Kunzite’s hand, and said aloud, “Why?”

Gray eyes sought the ceiling for a moment, then closed. “According to the most-frequented temples, out of the void came of themselves the Earth, Love, Darkness, and Hell; everything else is their fault. Other stories say that everything is the fault of a creator-god whose son overthrew him in a particularly grisly fashion for it. Or that everything began when life-giving fresh water began to extricate itself from the devouring madness of the sea—”

“You can stop now.” Endymion tried to glare at him, but his irritation couldn’t sustain itself, not this time. “Why didn’t you _tell_ me?”

“I didn’t realize you expected me to carry out your religious education. Usually the family arranges that.”

The prince breathed out between his teeth. “There are plenty of parts of you that aren’t hurt that I can still hit.”

“Yes. Because clearly what we want to do is commit internecine violence on another sovereign power’s territory.”

“They’d probably thank me.”

“Her Highness of Jupiter might, yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me how you felt?”

The rhythm of the banter didn’t so much falter as drop stone dead on the spot. Kunzite might have fallen back unconscious, for all the visible reaction he gave.

Endymion tightened his hands on each other, and pursued. “You never said anything. You never let me feel any of it. You never even gave me a hint. Didn’t it ever occur to you that I might want to know?”

Kunzite breathed, slow, and opened his eyes to watch the ceiling again. “Yes,” he said, his tone indifferent. “But sometimes, Endymion, what you want doesn’t matter.”

“There’s only two of us involved in this. There’s not a lot of people _to_ matter.”

Pale eyebrows arched. “Princess Serenity is certainly involved, to begin with.”

“You didn’t say anything _before_ I met Serenity, either.”

“The entire population of the Earth is also involved. Also, more directly, the others of your Shitennou. Also your parents. And mine, for that matter.”

“The entire population of Earth,” the prince said, his tone touched briefly with bitterness, “can get their noses _out_ of my love life.”

“No.” Kunzite glanced toward him, eyes half-lidded, face not permitted to show pain. “They can’t. That’s the point.”

Endymion stepped back to what he felt was firmer ground. “You could still have told me.”

“Why?” Kunzite asked. “So you’d have the privilege of telling me no? So you’d be able to indulge in guilt over disappointing me? So I could explain to you in detail why it would be a terrible idea, and a betrayal of both of our positions?”

Endymion’s voice dropped to a whisper. “What makes you think I’d have told you no?”

Kunzite drew a breath to sigh, but let it out more sharply than intended, with a little wince. (Endymion glanced. Still no blood. Not when he looked.) “Because,” he said, “you’re not that much of a fool.”

“It’s not foolish. Before Serenity—”

“Before your forbidden darling,” Kunzite said, “you were still obligated to arrange a continuation of your bloodline. You were also still in authority over _all_ of your guards; so clearly favoring one would have set a cat among the pigeons. Not to mention that, no matter what the truth of the matter, it would have appeared to the rest of the court as if I were abusing my own position and access to you. No. It was not ever something to pursue. And because you are exceptionally stubborn, and deeply opposed to acknowledging political realities or the use of pragmatism, it was not ever something to reveal to you. To avoid exactly this conversation. And after your forbidden darling entered the picture—” Gray eyes flicked toward him again. “There is such a thing as needless cruelty.”

Endymion winced, and turned his face a little away, staring at the subtle patterns inlaid white-on-white into the walls. “Is … is there anything I can do to make it easier on you?”

“Pretend that you never saw that hint in my mind.” Kunzite breathed out, audible, slow. “And let me rest.”

“You _are_ resting.”

He waited for the expected retort—something about how much noise he was making, probably, or maybe something trickier or more amusing—but there was only silence.

Endymion bit at his lower lip. He wasn’t used to misjudging Kunzite’s moods (no matter that, apparently, he’d been doing just that on a fundamental level for years). Hesitant, without looking up, he finally moved to see them directly: he laid his hand over Kunzite’s.

And felt nothing. The skin beneath his was cold; the bones of Kunzite’s knuckles pressed sharply into Endymion’s palm.

Endymion jerked straight upward, and the flesh under his hand _tore_.

“No,” he breathed. “No, no, no—” Frantic, he turned to his guardian, reached to touch his face—

—jerked his hand back before contact could be made, because below one dark and hollow eye socket, bone showed where the cheek sagged away from it, pulled by something seeming to move, just beneath the surface, just out of sight. Melting. As if a candle’s wick had gone out not because it was snuffed but because the wick itself were made of black and twisted larvae, chewing their way out—

Kunzite smiled at him, teeth bare against darkening and distorted lips. “There are so _many_ things you never saw, Endymion.”

Endymion pulled upright, toppling his stool behind him, trying to find the breath to scream. All he could do was pant, harsh and fast, and make faint trapped noises in his throat—

“Endymion.”

—noises that rose higher and higher—

“Endymion!”

A rough hand shook his shoulder, hard, and he came awake with a gasp, reaching up and clinging to the wrist and letting Nephrite’s familiar temper and solidity flood him with connection to the here and now, to the real.

“Gods,” Endymion managed after a moment. “Sorry. Bad dream.”

“I _told_ you that trying to take a nap after going to personally take a look at the dead bodies was a terrible idea.” Nephrite scowled at him. Endymion considered trying to hug the scowl. At least Nephrite was irritated with him for a _good_ reason.

“You were right,” he said instead, quiet and fervent. “You were right.”


	12. "You underestimate yourselves."

It would probably have been a good idea to be getting some sleep; there hadn’t been much of that the last two days, and Jadeite was pretty sure that “better” was not a thing they were going to see for a while yet. But some things were more important to him than sleep, just now.

Not that there was going to be any kind of practical advantage to this visit. Kunzite would’ve given him that frown for it, though not objected out loud. Zoisite would probably make fun of him. Nephrite, though, Nephrite might understand.

Might. Jadeite wasn’t exactly planning on confessing to him to find out.

Instead, safely out of any conspicuous uniform, he made his way up the winding steps to the House of the Sun.

The House was the older of the great temples to the Sun in the city. The Basilica was larger, painted far more beautifully, the royal family’s official religious home when in residence and therefore the place where the major festivals were centered. There were dozens or more minor temples, local neighborhood shrines, sometimes just a tree in a courtyard or a particularly elaborately carved well. But out of all of them, Jadeite felt most at home in the House. Passing the gate in the outer wall, he could breathe a little more easily. Passing the decorative little building where the city’s reference weights were locked away, tradition that dated back farther than the Golden Kingdom’s claim on the place, he could remind himself that his troubles were small and transient things against the span of history, no matter how overwhelming they seemed to him now. Passing between the cool white columns and into the courtyard, roofless to let the Sun into its own House where it could appreciate the statues and reliefs carved and painted in its honor, he could feel almost at home.

There were no crowds, not now. A young man sweeping the paving-stones in preparation for the sunset services. An older woman draping a shawl over the shoulders of a statue; it was growing colder, and it was considered only polite to treat the images as if they were people. Probably a priest or four inside the sanctuary, but Jadeite had no intention of going that far; the weathered altar under the sky was more than enough for him.

He opened the satchel at his side, and took out a square of purple cloth, not the royal dye but richly and evenly colored enough to be valuable nonetheless; he laid it out at the foot of the altar, and set a dish of bright brass upon it, and heaped coins in that. Animals hadn’t been sacrificed at the altar for better than a century and a half, but measuring offerings in their worth was still traditional. For each of the prisoners murdered by magic the night before, he gave the value of a goat. Over the coins he placed incense and dried flower petals (Zoisite would _certainly_ mock him), and a small silver mirror.

Only once the gifts were given (and the temple-sweeper glancing his way to mark them, and the older woman sneaking a look around the arms of the statue she adorned) did Jadeite say anything out loud. Low-voiced; it would carry all too well in the empty courtyard, he’d need to be careful of his words. But under the sky, under the sky … perhaps he might be heard.

“Hail, Paean, first of all singers.” His fingertips touched the altar, just barely, and he kept his face turned westward, toward the lowering sun. Eyes closed; the Sun would not find worship enough of an excuse to keep from blinding him for staring too long. “Hail, gladdener of mortal men; hail, lord of the lyre, who gives us music to brighten our time between our rising and our setting. Hail, who guides us down to the darkness at the end of our day. Hail, Pythian Apollo, slayer of monsters, first defender, first killer, first forgiven. Hear our prayer: guide safely into the dark those whose lives were taken, that they may rise into the light again; teach them their sins, and teach them how to burn those sins away, that like you they too may be purified.

“Hail, who wards off evil, who guards the streets of the city, who averts harm and sends aid; may you guard us still, most of all Endymion, Prince of the Earth, who falls under your special protection. Hear our prayer: you who are physician and prophet, give him the knowledge he needs to guide our world as your light guides our steps.”

Jadeite fell silent for a moment, feeling nothing but the warmth on his face, the cold of the stone on his fingers, the cold of the wind on his cheek. He could stop there. He could. But there was one more aspect to the Sun that in this season—in the harvest season—it was wise to be very, very careful with.

“Hail, mouse-lord, preserver of the harvest, prince over all plagues. Hear our prayer: show us your kindness, spare us your anger. Let our wounds—” He thought of Kunzite, and stumbled over the words. “Let our wounds heal cleanly; let the autumn’s bounty see us safely through the winter. Be kind to us.” He hesitated, then said again, far more softly, “Please, be kind.”

The Sun did not answer, and the wind remained cold.

After a moment, Jadeite knelt again and bundled the gifts he’d offered in the cloth, to keep the weather from snatching more than the few petals it had already caught up. Undoubtedly the sweeper would be tiredly irate with him if he noticed, but anyone who came for the sunset rituals, to avert harm during the night, would likely leave far more detritus behind. Averting harm sounded good to him right now, too, but he’d have other places to be this evening, and tonight, and probably as far as he could think forward. This visit would have to do. Hopefully the Sun would forgive him.

The seed of darkness burned silently beneath his breastbone, an inch or two below his heart, every time he thought about forgiveness. Hastily, he put it out of his mind; when that failed, he turned firmly away from the sanctuary, toward the open gateway out of the courtyard.

The woman who’d been draping a statue in warmer clothes was waiting by the gateway. He hoped she might be waiting for the sweeper, but she stepped hesitantly forward as she approached. Definitely not young; her face could be anything from a worn forty to a young sixty, but the hair braided up beneath her shallow-crowned hat was rather more silver than iron. Her face … there was something familiar about her face, the angle of her jaw and the shape of her nose, but Jadeite couldn’t place it. Or her. He hoped at least she hadn’t placed him, either.

“Please,” she said, bobbing a little stiffly in something that resembled a curtsy, and just the fact that she started with that word made his heart sink. “Please, sir—begging your pardon for interrupting, but you were at the prison down by the river last night, weren’t you? They sent for you and brought you in?”

He stared at her blankly for a moment. How could someone her age still have both night vision good enough and sharp enough to have seen his face at any distance in the dark, and the stamina to be up all night and still awake the next afternoon? … no, he shouldn’t be surprised by that. She could’ve slept in the morning, like he did. And Kunzite was probably going to see better at night than most people did in the day till he died of old age. Other people might, too. It was conceivably possible.

She took his silence for a cue to go on. “My husband, Charidemus, he was there and saw the lights in the windows, and all the scurrying after, before they closed everything down. He came and fetched me to help, then. Our son was taken there just a day or so before, you see, and we were hoping to get a bit of word. But no-one’s come in or out willing to say anything, not for a drink or a meal or anything else. And I was hoping, sir, our son—his name’s Chares—is he all right? He’s never been in such a fight before, and I hear some of his friends died in it. And then the lights and all. We don’t need to ask anything that’d be wrong to tell, sir. Only if our boy’s all right.”

Chares. He stuck on the word for a moment; _that_ didn’t ring any bells either. But there was something familiar—

Some of his friends died in the fight.

He focused on her jaw and the shape of her nose, mentally overlaid a man’s face, eyes that took a moment too long to focus, pain lines and stiffness. The man he’d questioned. Chares wasn’t any of the names he’d given, but the resemblance was there, and she was old enough to be his mother.

The man he’d questioned, one of the men who’d gone after the princess of the Moon—the distorted, magic-slaughtered corpse he’d seen not even a day ago—had a mother and a father, who’d heard the news, who worried enough to leave off sleep in the hopes of hearing about their son’s condition, who would grieve when they knew.

He drew a careful breath, held it for a moment, said slowly: “I’m sorry. I can’t say anything about anyone who might be there, either. But if you’ll tell me where I can send you news, I’ll make sure you hear as soon as our orders permit it.” Technically, orders that they’d given were still their orders. Technically.

“Thank you, sir!” The woman made another stiff little bob, this one deeper and jerkier with her sudden excitement. Jadeite hated himself just a little more. “Thank you. You can leave word here if you like, sir, the priests and the wardens all know me—just tell them it’s for Neaira, they’ll know just who to give it to. They’ll know. Thank you.”

All his words had fled. Jadeite bowed to her as solemnly as he could, then stepped aside to bypass her. This time his route to the gate, out of the House’s precincts, was clear.

Not that that helped. That put him on the streets, with a ways to go through the city before he could find somewhere he could be unobserved. Keeping his expression calm, untouched … he could do it, but he hated that, too, he hated almost everything in this moment.

Jadeite could deal with death. That was a prerequisite of the job. Could deal with it without blinking, most of the time. All of the prince’s guards had to be ready to kill if they needed to, sometimes without warning. (Kunzite hadn’t had warning, when the attack on Serenity came.) All of them had to be able to deal with dead bodies. All of them had to be able to lead other people into battle, to convince them that killing was necessary, to bring them to the point where they _could_. They tried their best to avoid it. But the world was the world, and people were people, and sometimes conflicts came to violence, and sometimes, always, some idiot would get it into his head to try to kidnap or kill Endymion. And the definition of “prince’s guard” was “someone who will kill or die to keep Endymion safe.”

But every time something happened that made him have to remember that the people who died were _people_ —

He choked back the sound in his throat, and made himself not run; running would break it open worse. Nephrite. Nephrite would be with Endymion, or asleep. Nephrite’s library would be safe. Nobody would find him there for a while.

All their worst secrets stayed there. Like the terrible thing they’d done the spring before. And with terrible things on his mind, he couldn’t not remember.

There was only one place in this part of the world that Endymion’s Shitennou trusted enough to hold this conversation in.

Endymion particularly loved this city, this palace, its gardens; when he was not called either home to the sacred place his family had held for centuries, or out into some particular part of the world to heal the land or to deal with a threat, it was this city he came to. He spent so much time here, and therefore perforce the four best of his guard spent so much time here, that Nephrite had acquired a townhouse. Then rebuilt the townhouse from the foundations upward, reading the stars every step of the way, talking Jadeite into purifying metals for him, drawing them out into wires to lay into patterns hidden in the mortar, burying Zoisite’s little charms beneath the corners of the building, choosing the tapestries and the woods and everything down to the flowers in the garden and patterns of the upholstery to echo the faint traces of magic in the stones. Then consulting Kunzite, and if he didn’t confirm it worked, tearing it out and doing it again.

Until, at last, the building became a secret fortress in the middle of the city, and the library its magical heart: warded so heavily that Nephrite was certain not even the magic of the Moon could penetrate it.

With the spring crocus in bloom in the gardens, the place was particularly protected, or supposed to be, from nightmares and emotional storms. Jadeite hoped that would actually do some good. Nephrite had a tendency to fly off the handle, when Endymion wasn’t around to keep him grounded, and their prince was one of the exact people they were trying not to be overheard by today.

Not with the woman standing at the far end of the room, with hair as dark and nearly as flowing as the Princess of Mars, with a pale blouse and brown skirts giving her a look of unpolished simplicity, with pendant teardrops of cloudy stone bound at forehead and ears and throat. Any stranger looking at her might have thought her an unexpectedly lovely daughter of some artisan couple or of semi-prosperous farmers, with enough money to keep from spoiling her skin and hands, but no more than that.

Jadeite, on the other hand, had known Beryl for a decade. He knew that she _could_ be wearing silks and velvets, if she chose to. That she chose not to, because court fashions could absorb an endless amount of money, and she found it better used elsewhere; and because she of all women could afford to ignore a few of the social niceties. No-one could gainsay her, not if they wanted her to put her divination skills to work for them; and only Endymion in all the court had another seer of his own to question.

That seer stepped forward, heavily, putting his hand on the back of the chair he had yet to take. “The problem,” Nephrite said, “is the Moon.”

Beryl’s smile showed, first a tiny tug at the corner of her mouth, then something wider and yet still demure. “I presume there’s a reason you feel the need to tell _me_ that.”

“There’s someone who’s not … not thinking straight.” Nephrite grimaced, looking away from his guest. “Who won’t even consider the Moon as a potential enemy. If he had good arguments, that’d be one thing. But the Moon has so much power. And he refuses to admit they even _might_ use it.”

“I’m not convinced the Moon is an enemy in the first place,” Jadeite added, and braced for a reproving look from Kunzite. But Kunzite stayed where he was, propped in a chair as if it bothered him not at all that none of the rest of them were seated; as if he were somehow secretly enthroned, Zoisite behind him his loyal retainer, and listening to arguments in his own court. Arguments that bored him. Jadeite breathed out, and went on, “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least think about it. I’m pretty sure Kunzite has contingency plans for what to do if anyone in the guard turned coat, up to and including any of us. We should at least have an idea of what to do if the Moon went after us—”

“Die, probably,” Zoisite interjected.

“—and of how to _tell_ if they were starting to. Not just … reject the whole idea out of hand.”

“It’s been weeks now,” Nephrite said, “that the stars have been telling me there’s a doom coming from the heavens. Months. Who’s in the heavens, but the Silver Millennium? Maybe it’s not all of them, maybe it’s some secret traitor of their own. How do we tell, if he won’t even think about it?”

Beryl lifted a hand, delicate fingers unfolded in an unmistakable signal; without her having to say a word, the rest of them fell silent.

“I read things of the Earth,” she said directly to Nephrite. “The stars know more than I can see in my orb about matters of the heavens. This thing they tell you is coming. What do they say about it? What can you see in them?”

Nephrite grimaced, lowering his eyes. “Not as much as I’d like,” he said quietly. “They started around the time of that really bright meteor shower this winter, the one that came off-schedule and gave half the crackpots in the northern hemisphere an excuse to crack harder. And ever since then, it’s been harder for me to see. Like a hazy night, but all the time; when I try to get a clear, precise reading, I have to work through a blur at the best of times. At the worst, something like a black cloud.”

“The weather responds to your attempts at divination?” Beryl asked, a tiny furrow appearing for a moment between her eyebrows. Only for a moment. She’d grown up in the court’s orbit; avoiding the risk of wrinkles had been drummed into her right along with standing straight, using proper titles, and not spilling her drink.

“No. Not a physical cloud.” Nephrite frowned at the carpet. “Only something that makes it hard to pay close attention. Hard to keep my temper.”

Jadeite flicked a glance sidewise at Zoisite, but too late; Zoisite was already rolling his eyes where Beryl could see them. Well. That was all right. She’d seen enough of their wrangling she wouldn’t believe a _completely_ united front.

“Still. Something’s interfering with your communication with the stars. There aren’t many entities that could accomplish that.” Beryl focused on Kunzite for a moment. “Or that would have reason to want to.”

“A remarkably short list,” Kunzite agreed. “It’s true that not having alternative suspects is not the same as having proved guilt. It’s also true that one would be a fool not to consider the possibility of guilt. Or malice.”

Beryl lifted a hand in a show of modesty, but her smile was there again, warmer in its way. “I assure you _I_ have neither guilt nor malice in this situation.”

“Except toward the Moon. Which makes you a remarkably useful person to consult with. Doesn’t it.”

“The prince wouldn’t be pleased with your talking with me like this.” Beryl stepped forward, resting her hands on the back of another chair. “You owe him your first loyalty, don’t you? Aren’t you taking a risk with his regard for you?”

Nephrite shook his head, a necessarily small gesture to keep his hair from further disarray. “The prince is the one who isn’t thinking straight.”

“Besides,” Zoisite said lightly. “Loyalty to our prince and loyalty to our planet should never have to be at odds.”

Jadeite added, low, “And it’s not like we’re actually _doing_ anything. Just talking.” He sighed. “It’s not like we even have the ability to actually do anything. That’s the problem. The Moon has power we don’t. If they move against us, unless we’re prepared perfectly, they’ll walk right over us. Not the whole planet—Earth has numbers they can’t even dream about—but us, personally, and the rest of the royal family’s guard.”

Kunzite said nothing, but the bitter twitch of his mouth showed exactly how well his opinion of their odds matched Jadeite’s.

“So you come to me,” Beryl said softly. “Because I don’t trust the Moon. Because I know other people who don’t. And because, in the end … you may all have your talents, but given time, I can raise more power than all of you combined.”

“And do more with it.” Kunzite rose to his feet, unhurried, deliberate. “Your use of the art is more flexible than any of ours. You can come at the problem from angles none of us could or would think of. You have a chance of finding something we can use to defend ourselves.”

“I might.” Beryl’s right hand lifted again; she clasped the stone pendant from her right ear between thumb and forefinger. “I do. Your request was foreseen. I can’t guarantee you victory. But I can give you something that might, if you have need to call upon it, give us a chance.”

“Well?” Nephrite stepped forward, closing the distance between himself and the sorceress. “Why are we wasting time talking?”

Kunzite exhaled quietly, and exchanged a glance with his more colorful shadow. Zoisite laughed on the instant, and flitted to Nephrite’s side, setting a hand on his arm. “Because,” he said, “when asking favors from someone on the grounds that she’s more powerful and subtle than you are, it _might_ be best not to irritate her more than you absolutely have to. And we _are_ asking favors.”

“For the sake of the—”

“For the sake of the planet,” Beryl agreed, smoothly thieving the sentence right out of Nephrite’s mouth, “I am glad to do this. But it has cost me a great deal, you understand. I have worked most of the winter and all of the spring so far to raise the power for what you need from me.”

“Since your knowledge of our needs seems to outpace our own,” Kunzite said, “then permit me to ask: what, precisely, do you believe we need from you?”

Beryl drew her hand away from the earring, and something came with it.

It did not shimmer. It did, somehow, the reverse of shimmering: its surface seemed to well with a violet light, difficult and painful to look at, but it trembled and writhed and fell constantly into darkness. Jadeite found his breath changing, as if the passages in his throat and lungs were constricting in some instinctive attempt to keep that much concentrated power _away_.

“This is made,” Beryl said quietly, “of Earthly things. It draws its energy from outcroppings of bedrock, from flowing lava, from the deeps of the oceans and the hurricane winds and the passions in the hearts of the living. And it is patterned after a gift of the Sun. A gift of Pythian Apollo, the destroyer of monsters, whose blessing I begged and whose blessing was granted. This is a seed of the Earth’s own power. I have one for each of you. If you take it—you may bear it within you in secret, sheltered from the Moon’s spying. It will lie dormant. It will never trouble you. If the Moon never moves against the Earth, you will never have any need for it to be otherwise.

“But when the time comes that there is need—you may ask it to grow within you, and to blossom. And it will lend you the power of the Earth and of the Sun, the power that you will need to oppose the magical warriors of the Silver Millennium. I do not know what form Pythodoros’ shadow will take in each of you; I know that it will move to enhance your own magic, to support you in seeing and doing what is necessary, but the details none of us will know until there is need.”

“When the time comes,” said Jadeite reluctantly. “You mean if?”

Beryl turned to look at him, and the tilt of her head spoke of gentleness, and indulgence, and sorrow, and he found himself feeling like a fourteen-year-old again, new at court and tripping over his feet and his tongue about equally often. “The stars have been telling Nephrite for months. I fear it will be a when.”

For the space of a breath, the room fell silent. Then Zoisite let his hand slip from Nephrite’s arm, and offered his other hand, his right, to Beryl. “Let’s see what happens.”

“No,” said Kunzite. And before Zoisite could protest or Nephrite begin to show his temper again, he added, “You may be second, Zoisite. But I will be first. The rest of you will wait till we see whether she’s correct about this thing lying dormant. And if I tell you that something is going wrong, Zoisite, you will go to tell our prince _that instant_. Let the others deal with whatever happens here.”

Jadeite drew a breath to argue. Kunzite quelled him with a look. And—in fairness, he couldn’t argue. Kunzite would be able to track what the thing did in ways none of the rest of them could. And yet. And yet—

“Kunzite.” His throat closed again around the word. It made him sound like he’d dropped half a dozen years. “You have to be kidding. If something goes wrong, we can’t _stop_ you.”

“You underestimate yourselves.” Kunzite gave him another glance, a fractionally easier one, the faint trace of a line showing at the corner of his eye. Then he turned away from all three of them, putting his back to Jadeite and Nephrite, looking away from Zoisite at his side, and reached to clasp his hand around the not-light hovering above Beryl’s palm.

For an instant, it was like being a child, putting closed fingers between one’s eyes and the fierce brightness of the summer sun, and seeing the faint, morbid traces of bones dark against the dim hot red of one’s own living flesh. Except that it wasn’t anything as small and reassuring as fingerbones. Jadeite didn’t understand that the source was moving until it had slid from Kunzite’s hand down his wrist and forearm and curved up to trace the course of the vein inside his elbow. He could almost-see, even through his uniform, the shadows cast by ribs and shoulderblade, the complicated pressure exerted on that confined power by the passage of air into and out of Kunzite’s lungs.

Kunzite opened his empty hand, laid it over his sternum, bent his head to frown down at it. And as if simply doing something so typical of him made a difference somehow, the sense of that power dimmed; in a second or two he seemed solid again. After a few more breaths, it was only the five of them, standing in the library. Nothing might have happened at all.

Jadeite wanted very badly to believe that nothing had happened at all.


End file.
